#i know at least three specific people whom this will pertain to and this is for you my friends

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

I know you enjoyed the game, so I wanted to ask here: which BG3 companions would have which cats as their pets?

We're cooking with gas and putting two hyperfixations into the large hadron collider, eh?

Okay, I can tell you right now that I have several off the top of my head, not only in that would have them as "pets" (or to the extent that Halsin would consider an animal a "pet" which is more of a companion) but that they align from a character personality standpoint:

Astarion - Black and White Alonzo (Vain with courage issues) and - stay with me - The Rum Tum Tugger. Little chaotic shit with a showboat streak who holds a grudge with underlying emotional depth? Astarion. Tugger.

Lae'zel - If she could be persuaded into having a pet, I just can't help but see her with the haughty, disdainful and lonely Cassandra.

Wyll - Munkustrap and Victoria (The protector, the courageous and the loving and the romantic little princess)

Shadowheart - Demeter and Bombalurina (Both gals are both sides of Shadowheart's personality and I feel like she'd get on well with the two of them). She's also a potential Jemima weird girl.

Karlach - I can see Karlach with any of the kittens or adolescents tbh, but Tumblebrutus/Bill Bailey and Etcetera are coming to the forefront of my mind.

Gale - you think I'm going to say Magical Mr. Mistoffelees or maybe Coricopat and Tantomile (though I can absolutely see those), but it's obviously Jennyanydots and/or Jellylorum. Jenny and Jelly are essentially Tara. It makes the most sense. I would even throw Skimbleshanks in there for good measure. Gale is a cat dad - he can have 3+ as a treat.

Minthara - Grizabella (Proud to a fault and indomitable? Minthara. Hurt? Also Minthara. This one just makes a lot of sense to me, particularly if you trace who Grizabella used to be along with who Minthara used to be pre-tadpole and brainwashing.)

Halsin - Deuteronomy (Wise, loving and a commanding presence, Old Deuteronomy belongs to no one and is beloved by all - generally even tempered and protective. Oldest cat with dad lore. He also gets kidnapped, waxes the occasional poetic, and canonically *redacted*)

[hamliet]

What Does It Mean to Save?

I keep seeing it said that Deku, Ochaco, and Shouto will “save” Shigaraki, Himiko, and Dabi, but that there will be no redemption and/or no survival for them. I’m truly not trying to vague these posts and everyone is entitled to their opinion, but literary criticism is fundamentally responsive so I’m writing this anyways.

I personally think that’s not BNHA’s definition of saving nor of redemption. So here, have a deep dive into literary tropes related to redemption, genre, and character arcs as they pertain to BNHA and the question of: what does it mean to save Shigaraki, Touya, and Himiko?

Before we begin, let me say that while we might be personally uncomfortable with redemption (there’s a redemption arc in BNHA I am personally quite uncomfortable with), that doesn’t inherently mean the narrative won’t go there. The key principle I’m operating on here is BNHA’s message that heroes save people. It’s held up as the highest ideal. 

So let’s talk redemption in BNHA-verse. With this guy, whose redemption arc I dislike in principle but accept as part of the story so don’t come for me stans and/or antis. I’m analyzing because it shows us what redemption means in BNHA-verse, whether or not that is satisfying to you personally as it fits/does not fit with your own morality/philosophy.

If Endeavor can be redeemed and live, and he’s Bakugou’s negative foil, I highly doubt Shigaraki and Deku as well as Touya and Shouto and Ochaco and Himiko will be any different. Why? Because Enji is an adult character. The others--well, Himiko’s age we don’t know, but we do know that Shigaraki and Dabi are technically adults. But does the story consider them adults?

(It doesn’t.)

Child-coded characters are generally more likely to survive a redemption, which I’ll explain more later. First I have to define what I mean by child-coding, because I DO NOT mean this in the way it’s often (mis)used in fandom wank. Child-coding is a real thing, but it is not done to infantilize and it has nothing to do with shipping.

Child coding frames the character as a child for a few narrative purposes to convey a story’s theme or purpose. For example, if it’s a coming of age story coding a character as a child even if they legally are not emphasizes their journey to an understanding of self-actualization, or a true understanding of self with self-awareness and an understanding of self-value. An example of an adult coded as a child is The Kite Runner, wherein Amir is a legal adult for half the story, even married for fifteen years so we’re talking 30s-40s, but he does not truly become an adult until he returns to his homeland and takes responsibility for a childhood sin. In Attack on Titan, the main characters are now nineteen, but are still struggling to take responsibility as adults and have only started doing so now that their mentors/parental figures have started dying.

Along those lines, in any kind of story, you can code a character as a child of someone, regardless of biological relationship, to convey the type of relationship they have (usually a mentor one). For an example of this, see Bungo Stray Dogs’ Dazai and Akutagawa. Despite their two year age difference, Dazai recruited him to the mafia, abandoned him, and Akutagawa desperately seeks his approval. Usually in these stories a character will “overcome” their parental figure. This can be done through overcoming their need for the parental figure’s approval in stories where the parental figure is kindly (such as in Harry Potter, when in the final book Harry, Ron, and Hermione leave the Weasleys to find the Horcruxes despite Mrs. Weasley’s please) or through like, killing/stopping/leaving the parental figure when they are abusive (see fairy tales like Rapunzel and Cinderella). The parental link to self-actualization is because it is childlike (and a part of actual psychology that is reflected in literature) to see yourself as a part of your parent; self-actualized person would see yourself as a distinct person from your parent, but also acknowledge the ways in which they’ve shaped you.

So, how do you code a character as a child? BNHA isn’t subtle about it, because Horikoshi seldom is subtle about anything. The villain trio are all coded as children.

Shigaraki Tomura:

Who cannot achieve self-actualization so long as AFO has access to his body, as he’s literally trying to possess him. He’s trying, but it’s not gonna work because Shigaraki can’t keep AFO and become an adult at the same time. It’s a choice the narrative is setting up: your dream of destroying, or your freedom? (To get the latter, he’ll probably have to destroy AFO).

Todoroki Touya, who is repeatedly emphasized as a small child when compared to his siblings, and yes, I know he’s now tall. Specifically he’s spotlighted as the child of Endeavor:

And he’s the least self-actualized one in a lot of ways, contradicting himself constantly. I’m not Endeavor, DUH! But these are Endeavor’s flames! He’s gonna have to choose one or the other, because the tragic irony is that the more he takes out his rage on those around him, the more like Endeavor he becomes.

And Toga Himiko (who might well literally be a legal child), who is actually the most self-actualized one thus far, because she rejects Curious’s child insistence (Curious holds her in a Pieta pose, based on Michelangelo’s statue wherein Mary holds a deceased Christ):

She’s still got, like, a way to go though:

Because Himiko also wants to be like the people she loves to the point where she loses her own identity in them, which is er, not self-actualization. So she’ll have to choose whether or not she really wants to be like the people she loves or whether she wants to live her own way, which she herself tells us how that would end (death):

Deku said it himself: it’s good to focus on what someone is doing now. And look, I have issues with this statement and how it’s framed. I’ve talked about it at length and it was doomed to fail because Shouto himself told us long ago that it was annoying to hear a righteous speech by a stranger when you hadn’t gone through the same, plus Endeavor kinda failed by choosing being a hero over a dad here. But, the principle is that if the past doesn’t preclude Endeavor from seeking a better self, why would it preclude three characters coded as children, one of whom is literally somewhat the product of Endeavor’s sins? BNHA doesn’t think the past keeps someone from a better future. 

So what about Dabi’s counterpoint, which is indeed valid? Well, redemption doesn’t mean the past forgets, either. It’s complicated and nuanced, and we can debate how well Horikoshi strikes this nuance (it’s got its flaws), and admittedly I don’t know how this will go down in the future. But it is asking Endeavor: how do you redeem yourself to the people you’ve hurt? And we have Endeavor asking this question to Touya’s shrine. I mean, the foreshadowing is obvious. Endeavor has to redeem himself by trying to save Touya. However, it will still probably come down to Shouto to save Touya.

For our three villains, it’s a little harder to predict... well, sort of. For Shigaraki it’s extremely obvious: he has to help take down AFO. Dabi probably has to do something to help his family (siblings probably), but it’s vague. Toga needs help and not condemnation, but presumably she’ll help Ochaco with something.

So, is this redemption? I’d define it as redemption in the eyes of the narrative. To address what makes a redemption is another essay unto itself, but if we bring in the oft-compared Star Wars example: did Darth Vader get a redemption? Did Ben Solo? Everyone says yes to both. However, only Luke witnesses Vader’s redemption, and only Rey Ben Solo’s. So the rest of the galaxy? Doesn’t think so. When I say they’ll be redeemed, I’m defining it as their role in the eyes of the narrative, not whether or not society will accept them or even whether their victims will forgive them (of note, in canonical novels, Leia never forgave Darth Vader despite learning he was her father and obviously knowing Luke’s account of his redemption was true).

So, redemption in a narrative doesn’t mean all of society has to forgive and accept them. Dabi has still like, murdered 30 people--many of whom were thugs, but he himself acknowledges they didn’t deserve to die. Additionally, he himself also acknowledges that the families left behind--their feelings matter:

But why does that mean they have to die? Why even does it mean they have to languish in prison forever? (If there’s even a safe prison at the end of BNHA which I kinda have doubts about.) Heroes have also killed: see Hawks as Exhibit A. In fact, some people want revenge on the heroes precisely because they arrested or killed their loved ones (jail isn’t held up as a rehabilitative place in BNHA’s world. In most countries it isn’t in real life, either, but again that’s for another essay). So why don’t the League’s feelings on Twice’s death matter just as much as the feelings of unnamed and unseen (and thereby less important narratively) characters?

Additionally, regarding death... the villains routinely get called on their death wishes. Himiko’s determination to decide how/when she dies is called out because this is right  before Twice overcomes his trauma to save her, and the next arc they appear in is when Twice dies trying to save her again. Dabi’s suicide wish keeps him from getting close to others, and it keeps getting thwarted. Shigaraki’s obsession with destruction and death is clearly not a good thing, and his rejection of his family’s desire for them to join him in death this past arc is growth.

In other words: what Dabi said and what Snatch said about families and how they feel matter for the villains too. The villains are their own weird found family (Dabi as the deadbeat prodigal brother of both his families). Their deaths--Magne’s and Twice’s thus far, and I’m not ruling out further deaths in the future--affect the others. People’s feelings on losing loved ones matter. The villains are people, as Himiko said herself this arc:

Their feelings about each other matter:

How would Touya dying affect the Todorokis? At least they saved him spiritually, I guess, but that’s absolutely lame narratively, and if you have Enji eventually do a sacrifice to save Dabi (pretty likely, even if I personally think Enji will survive said sacrifice) then what’s the point of Dabi dying? How would Himiko dying affect society? As a martyr like Curious wanted her to be, even a redeemed one? A tragic warning story? What even is the point of Ochaco saving her if that’s the case? If Shigaraki dies, well, who would mourn besides Deku? How would Shigaraki dying affect the surviving members of the league? He just couldn’t be saved physically? 

It’s not impossible some of this happens, but it doesn’t seem like great writing, especially with panels like, oh, these that show us BNHA’s perspective on death:

Sacrificing something is a type of death that occurs in stories; this should happen in a redemption arc, which is why I’ve been saying Enji needs to sacrifice his hero reputation to help save Touya and even then it’ll still be Shouto imo who does the saving. But physical death?

If you want further analysis of the latter two panels and how they relate to the ending, see here.

We already have another villain who will definitely die redemptively (Kurogiri--an adult coded character--because he’s already, like, dead), and Spinner and Mr. Compress aren’t coded as kids so I hold them with anxiety towards the end. But again, this isn’t me being ageist or saying this is the way things ought to be in fiction or real life: it’s me looking at writing tropes and saying that child-coded characters tend to survive their redemptions. See: Zuko. Why? Because the death of children or child-coded characters is a tragedy. When a child-coded character dies redemptively it doesn’t feel like a happy ending and if framed as such, it’s often criticized for bad writing (see: Ben Solo). Curious even called this out in her fight with Himiko. I would hope Horikoshi doesn’t end the story being like yeah Curious was right that’s the best use of Himiko’s/Dabi’s/Shigaraki’s arcs:

Additionally, as for the believability of a character getting a new chance after so much destruction and murder... well, it’s kinda a thing in shonen and even in seinen? For better or for worse, it’s a thing. We have Vegeta in Dragon Ball Z and Kaneki Ken in Tokyo Ghoul (Kaneki, by the way, is absolutely an inspiration for Shigaraki). We can debate how well-written these redemptions are (I personally have been quite critical of Kaneki’s despite wanting it to happen narratively), but it can be done. BNHA’s Japan especially isn’t as harsh a world as Tokyo Ghoul’s Japan, so it would make even more sense for something like Kaneki’s ending.

The reality is that the cycle of revenge via hurting people and then leaving hurting families and loved ones has to stop somewhere. Someone has to be the bigger person and step up and be like “naw.” That’s heroic. That’s brave. That’s sacrificial itself. Justice itself doesn’t really exist in its purest form without mercy.

There’s another genre-reason I don’t see death or jail as likely (I could see, like, maybe a mental health ward like Rei’s? But it’s too soon to speculate).

If saving is considered a good thing for the story, if it’s truly the highest ideal, then saving someone should be rewarded by the narrative. The characters who save should have a positive result to show us this a good thing.

This is why it doesn’t work for the heroes’ end journey to be accepting that some people cannot be saved. The notion of just accepting that you cannot do something, you cannot save everyone, you cannot, cannot, cannot, is called out as a flaw of society. Determination, on the other hand, is rewarded.

We see it with Deku as well as with Mirio.

So, what if they save them and the redeemed characters then go on to sacrifice themselves in their redemption and die (come to the same end)? If saving changes absolutely nothing for the saved person, if it’s too late for the saved from themselves to change and/or do anything that matters besides die, then the narrative theme of saving as important is left unemphasized at best and undermined at worst. Simple intrinsic knowledge that the kids “did the right thing” doesn’t cut it for a story with so much focus on physical saving when the kids are already doing the right thing; moral struggles about whether to choose to be good aren’t really Deku, Ochaco, or Shouto’s arcs. It works for Aizawa’s arc with Kurogiri, but not for the kiddos. If BNHA was more of a philosophical/spiritual text, that would indeed make sense, but it is not. Genre-wise, BNHA is a fantastical superhero optimistic story, not a gritty real-world set drama.

[regrettablewritings]

Can I request a Love head canon with Geralt please? I just read the pre-relationship one you did for Jaskier and I absolutely loved it!!

I mean... I can try 😅 Though, I think it should go without saying that Geralt isn’t exactly synonymous with love and affection as we relatively human beings interpret them . . .

Who said “I love you” first?: Assuming we’re sticking strictly to the verbal expression of the phrase, I believe you already know the answer to this. After all, it’s simply not in Geralt’s nature to be the most talkative person, much less vulnerable and affectionate. And that’s referring to his nature as being Geralt of Rivia and not specifically his nature of being a Witcher. You could wait an entire run of three human lifetimes and still potentially have to wait just a bit more to hear Geralt willingly say, “I love you” in this manner. It’s nothing against you, of course, but it’s better for you to recognize this and accept it than force otherwise. Besides, it’s not as though he doesn’t appreciate it: Deep down, Geralt is beyond startled that you would willingly apply such affection and devotion to him of all people, and a Witcher at that! Though, if you’re willing to stretch the expression one uses for “I Love you”, then it’s arguable that Geralt said it first, in some way, considering that . . .

What are their primary love languages?: Geralt is a very . . . sexual being. Physically aggressive. And considering his complex relationship with Yennefer, it therefore would stand to reason that his primary expression of “love” comes in the form of physical touch. Hell, if love languages were a thing acknowledged of the period (and if Geralt ever even cared to acknowledge them), he might’ve grunted and agreed so himself, even if only to get the conversation over faster. But the longer he spends having you as his companion, the more evident it becomes to him that this may not be the case. The thing is, physical touch can be more than just sexual release -- but for him, that’s all it ever was, simply because it was easier for him to do when Yennefer was still around. But since then, he’s come to recognize that perhaps he has more to offer than he gave himself credit for: Geralt operates through acts of service. Geralt is never going to be the most openly expressive one of the bunch, even when it pertains to you. But he’s always going to show his care for those whom he has a soft spot for by assuring their safety and well-being -- in odds and ends, so to speak. He’s never going to write you sonnets or wax poetically to you; he will rarely hold your hand just for the sake of doing so, or be the best at offering words that could technically be comprehended as affectionate. But when he notices you’re tired, he won’t hesitate to place you on Roach’s back -- an absolute honor, considering his protectiveness towards the mare. He’ll make sure that you’re warm and sheltered when you break camp, even if it comes at the cost of his own comfort (not that he feels much of a difference after this point anyway). If he thinks you may be doing something or even considering doing something that might put you in harm’s way or cause you mental or emotional pain, he’s unafraid to shoot that shit down (he loves you enough to let you hate him, so to speak). It may be the bare minimum that he saves you from a death of cold or starvation or hazardous encounters, but for him, it’s a way of showing he at least respects your right to continue living. He doesn’t really expect anything back besides respect. And perhaps some . . . physical comforts. But, once again, to his surprise, he’s not solely focused on physical touch when it comes to you. At least, not as intensely as he normally would be. What Geralt specifically appreciates form you is words of affirmation. But only from you: None of that showy, obnoxious nonsense that Jaskier calls music. Geralt likes feeling recognized as a person, questionable as that sort of title might actually be. He just likes being talked to to a degree, over small things. The affirmations come where you openly appreciate him for his efforts and bravery, and even when you thank him for taking care of you. Being a Witcher is a thankless job. But hearing you appreciate him for everything, big and small, and acknowledging his more humanistic traits at the same time? It does him more good than both you and he ever thought it could.

How often do they cuddle/engage in PDA?: The closest you get is when the two of you are either in a very crowded market place or are running and you’re having trouble keeping up: He’ll hold your hand to assure you don’t get separated or left behind. There’s also, of course, the preservation of body heat when the both of you wind up breaking camp on a particularly cold night.  But other than that, I wouldn’t expect much in the ways of affection.

What are their favorite things to do together?: The lifestyle you both lead (well, that Geralt leads -- you simply adopted it by association) doesn’t exactly lend itself well to couples’ hobbies . . . But the two of you haven’t bitten each other’s throats out yet, so clearly you’re doing something right, no? You aren’t quite sure what it is, but you heavily suspect that it might be when you ask Geralt to tell you about the creatures he’s encountered. Not in the “Tell Me Stories of Your Amazing Feats” kind of way, but more so in a manner of “Please Make Me Aware of the Weird, Strange, and Horrific Beings Lurking in This World and How To Combat Them”. Which suits Geralt well enough, as he tends to skimp on the details and doesn’t care to describe battles or anything of the sort. He knows that you’ll never be a Witcher, but it surely couldn’t hurt you to have an awareness of the world around you. Besides, he’s witnessed far too often the slaughtering of perfectly harmless creatures due to ignorance -- he feels a sense of relief when you express an interest in learning how to differentiate beasts with intentions of harm and beasts that simply want to be left alone unless provoked.

Who’s better at comforting the other?: Neither of you is especially great at it, but for different reasons. Though it should at least be said that you’re better skilled at comforting than Geralt is: You by far are the more emotionally available and intelligent one between the two of you, so the efforts you put forward are at least more overt. However, given that Geralt is a rather standoffish person and not especially prone to expressing vulnerabilities of any kind, it’s hard for you to know if you’re getting through to him. He won’t make it blatantly obvious if something is bothering him unless it’s bothering him in a way that earns his aggression -- and even then, he doesn’t need comfort, he needs you to gently chide him and calm him down as one does to an agitated horse or dog. Or a wolf, in this case. Meanwhile, Geralt . . . just isn’t the best at comforting people. At least, not in the most traditional sense. When he tries to be, it comes off very awkwardly, the words not filled confidence as much as they are hesitancy. It’s only made worse by the fact that his gruff, barely-used voice just isn’t compatible with the words he tries to use. Which is why he feels the best he can really offer to do is just say nothing at all. He won’t reject you or even flinch if you were to bury yourself into his side, instead just slowly placing an arm around you and trying to give a consoling, if stiff, pat on the back. Please know that this is him trying his best, and that he’ll be far more relieved than you’ll be if you actually do find some semblance of comfort in his seemingly low-effort efforts.

Who’s more protective?: Geralt wouldn’t consider what he does protection -- it’s simply what he, well, does. He’s always fighting creatures (and people) in self-defense or for a cause of some kind. And whenever Jaskier joins the two of you, or once Ciri becomes a part of his life, the job only intensifies. Him keeping you alive is simply common decency, lover or not. But if one were to ask someone who’s more emotionally observant like, say, a certain bard who occasionally accompanies the two of you, then he would beg to differ: Geralt is fiercely protective of you, he just does so quietly. Contrary to his stony nature,he does value your well-being. And even if you’re a commendable fighter, he acknowledges that it’s not as up to snuff as his own, making him feel more obligated to assure you come out of encounters alive and well. This is more obvious in the wilderness, of course, but when it comes to civilization he tends to become a bit more lax. He trusts you enough to measure your options when, say, some men at a pub are making particularly bawdy comments about you. He also trusts you to know when to whip out that knife you always keep on you. However, you needn’t worry about him turning a blind eye, should things threaten to escalate: Whether you’re at a marketplace buying some necessities, or paying for your meal at a tavern, Geralt is never so far away that he can’t keep a close eye on you or be unable to step in, should the environment intensify.

Do they prefer verbal or physical affection?: Geralt likes verbal affirmations, yes, but don’t discount physical: At least he doesn’t have to talk or respond when at the end of a long day, you sit next to him and nuzzle your head up to the crook of his neck. Plus there’s the whole intimacy he experiences for the first time in its true form when you and he finally decide to take that step.

What are some songs that apply to their relationship, in-universe or otherwise?: Hm. It’s hard to say, especially considering that Geralt is a hard person to apply music to, much less music with a narrative or one that actually sounds like anything he might listen to, particularly in a romantic setting. I had to push past that mindset just to pick anything, and what that got me to conclude was something along the lines of “Love Like You” by Rebecca Sugar or "Resilience” by Thomas Newman. Maybe “My Blood” by Twenty-One Pilots. I can’t place exactly how or why, especially sound-wise, but these just stood out to me in particular . . .

What kind of nicknames do they call each other?: You two don’t really resort to nicknames, actually. “Geralt” isn’t exactly an easy name to harvest a nickname out of, and he doesn’t do anything that particularly warrants one in reference to an idiosyncrasy. The closest you ever got was trying out “Wolfy” in reference to his title as “The White Wolf” but the look the attempt received, coupled with your own realized distaste for it, made you drop it in an instant. And Geralt just isn’t the sort to apply nicknames in the first place.

Thank you for requesting this! I hope I did okay . . .

[realityhelixcreates]

Beta, Theta, and Me

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: Thor (Movies), Avengers (Movies) Marvel Cinematic Universe Rating: PG Warnings: Swearing, Homelessness,  Relationships: Loki x Reader (But not right now) Characters: Tony Stark, Thor(Marvel), Loki(Marvel) Additional Tags:  A/B/O, Sorta, More Of An Exploration Of Life And Self Expression Within An A/B/O Framework, Loki Does What He Wants, But Loki Does Not Actually Do What He Wants, Antagonistic Bosses, Managerial Differences

Summary:  As it becomes clearer that your immediate superior hates you, and clearer that Tony needs to put someone somewhere else, you get caught up in things that are way above your paygrade.

“Mr. Stark!”

“And now I gotta deal with this.” He muttered, closing a holo-screen and whirling in his rolling stool to face her. “Florence! Surprised to see you. Isn't there somebody else to see to whatever problem you have?”

“It has to do with that new hire, Whom you forced on us. Since it has to do with her, I bring it to you.”

“Hey, do I pay you for sass?”

“No, you pay me because I am the best at what I do. I mean to continue doing it.” She slapped a paper down in front of him.

“I don't like being handed-”

“That's why I didn't.” She tapped the paper. It was an application. “She has falsified information. Look.”

He looked. He couldn't help it. Florence reminded him altogether too much of one of his old nannies. He could never disobey that woman either.

On the application, next to Secondary Gender, you had scrawled not the usual α, β, or Ω, but a θ instead.

“Maybe...it's a sloppy Beta? Like just a really sloppy B?”

“Except she writes a perfectly legible B later on. Also, this address is false. No one lives there, it's a storage center. I wouldn't put money on that phone number being legit either. On top of that-” She said, cutting Tony off. “I have caught her filching food from the employee cafeteria.”

“Oh yeah? What did she take?”

“Creamers, jelly, crackers, and salad dressing packets.”

“So...all the stuff we offer for free?”

“With purchase of something else.” Florence sniffed. “Also, I caught these this morning.”

She held her phone out, showing slightly blurry pictures of a person who might be you climbing out of the dumpster behind the building.

“Okay, that doesn't necessarily prove anything.”

“And I've caught her sleeping around the building.”

“On the clock?”

“On breaks, and sometimes before her shift.”

“So, not on the clock.”

“Sir, she is breaking the law!”

“Well, so did you when you took that picture without her consent. I don't tolerate spying on my employees.”

“Sir!”

“What's the real problem here, Florence? That she's homeless? Don't we want them to go get jobs? Then suddenly she's got one, and you're like, no not like that?”

“I just don't understand why you are rewarding a stranger for breaking the rules. Indecent exposure in the bathroom, and you give her a job. Lying on her application, and you defend her. You don't even know this girl, you don't know why she was on the street, what warrants might be out for her, what problems she might have, what havoc she might cause. That nonsense symbol on her gender identification alone shows she's not taking this seriously!”

“Theta.” He murmured.

“Pardon?”

“It's not nonsense, it's a Theta. It's just another letter. We use it in mathematics all the time; it means there's an angle.”

“Is she trying to tell us she's crooked?” Florence demanded.

“She's probably just a Beta who thinks secondary gender inquiries are an invasion of privacy. It's all the rage among the young people these days. In any case, just keep her on for a week or two. If she's gonna wash out, you'll know by then. It'll give you the chance to do a few more interviews. You're still looking for extra help, right? You've got permission, go on ahead and do it. Two, three more people.”

“Well...Alright.” Florence said, mollified. “Thank you sir.”

“You know I got your back. But we gotta shake things up every now and then, keep things fresh. Get in people from all walks of life, keep in touch with the pulse of society, all that. Now run along, dear. You've got a ship to keep shape, don't you?”

“That I do, sir.” Florence left, forgetting the application behind her. Tony held the paper up, examining it. Fake address for sure, and likely the number was for a burner phone. Age, education, and work history looked legit. There was a year and a half gap between your last job and this one: it probably marked the amount of time you'd been on the streets.

A Theta symbol. Why that, specifically?

“You're not too fond of Florence, are you?” F.R.I.D.A.Y. asked.

Tony shrugged. “Not really, but she's damn good at her job. That's all I really need from her. Would you do me a favor and look up gender expressions pertaining to Theta? There's a lot of new terminology I need to get caught up with. This might be one of them.”

                                                                                  *****

You sneaked another sugar packet from the ground floor coffee shop, fully aware that the amused barista was watching, and didn't care in the slightest.

You sprinkled a tiny bit into a little container of coffee creamer, then knocked the whole thing back like some kind of shot.

Everybody knew now that you worked here, and if they speculated about your bizarre eating habits, none of them said anything to you about it.

As long as you didn't break any rules, nobody seemed to care.

Fine by you. Even though they were small, simple snacks; salad crackers with tiny packets of jelly, butter, and salad dressing, sugar, salt and pepper packs, creamers, ketchups, mustards, and mayonaise, these were quick and easy sources of calories that hadn't been readily available to you before.

Having a fresh uniform each day was kind of amazing. Florence insisted that all uniforms be cleaned and disinfected properly, which meant they all got left behind at the end of the day, and were clean by morning. It had the added bonus of no one seeing you wearing a Stark-affiliated uniform while you were sleeping on the fire escape, or hanging around near the dumpsters outside

You weren't exactly friends with the baristas here, you never even talked, but ever since you had run a creeper out of the shop by being generally stinky and unpleasant to be around, they had started disposing of their expired muffins and cookies by wrapping them in wax papers or bags. Their boss hadn't caught on yet, but you were deeply grateful to them for every bite you salvaged from the trash.

Soon you would get your first paycheck, and then you could buy a decent meal. You'd been planning and dreaming of what it would be. Steak and potatoes? An omelet? Maybe just a regular old hamburger and Coke?

It might be the only paycheck you saw from Stark Industries though. You'd overheard Florence and Khalil talking, and she was determined to be rid of you. Khalil didn't really seem to agree, but he had kids at home, and probably couldn't afford to argue.

It didn't matter. Even if it was less than a week, you could put Stark Industries on your resume forever now. That would get you in the door. Janitorial training was a pretty good skill too. Every business needed cleaning staff, no exceptions.

Things were really looking up for you.

No one had even called you on all the weird stuff you'd put on your application.

You hadn't lied, exactly. Not exactly. Sure, you didn't live permanently at the address you'd provided, but you did sleep there sometimes. And you had gone to the school you named...before your parents completely succumbed to their paranoia and pulled you for homeschooling. The hadn't wanted public educators to fill your head with 'propaganda'.

And that was your phone number, though you'd have to buy some minutes when you got paid.

It was all at least semi-true.

Even the Theta was a symbol you had picked up off the internet, when researching what was wrong with you.

You tossed back another sugared creamer.

Having a routine again felt good. It had been over a year, but you slipped back into civilization pretty easily. You were so lucky. You always told yourself that.

Yeah, even if Florence gave you the boot, you still had options. This chapter in your life might soon be coming to an end.

Soon. You just had to wait, and work.

                                                                                                                                                    *****

Tony looked over the long, primly written list with amused disbelief.

“Is this...Is he serious?” He asked Thor. “I literally cannot tell when he is being serious, and when he is trolling me.”

“Welcome to the last thousand years of my life.” Thor said dryly, taking the list from Tony, and skimming over it. He held his hand out for a pen, and when Tony handed him one, he began crossing things off of the list.

“No...No...Absolutely not...Oh, he just put that one in there to annoy me...” Thor handed the list back. “But for the most part, yes. He is serious. Whatever else he may be-” He paused at Tony's muttering of 'war criminal' then forged on. “He is still the Crown Prince of Asgard, and the true King of Jotunheim. He is entitled to certain amenities. And then there is his...condition to think about.”

“Crown Prince of-no offense-a set of postage stamp sized fishing villages in Nova Scotia, and true King of a planet so far away that they can't even reach us to take him back. What exactly does he think he's entitled to on an enemy planet? He's here for punishment, right?”

“He's here for rehabilitation. And so that we can try to winkle out the information that we need. The goal is that he comes back to one of Asgard's 'postage stamp' villages eventually. But that man is still out there, and it's altogether too likely that he will make his way here. We're going to have to indulge my brother a bit, if we are to get information about it. Besides, he has proven himself a hero already, and suffered for it. He has earned a bit of leniency.”

“So you say, your majesty, but...” Tony scanned the revised list. “...I think I can provide most of this. But...servants? We don't really do that around here.”

“He will need assistance. And Loki has never been unduly cruel to servants who had done nothing to trouble him.”

“Okay, but what do you mean by 'trouble'? I mean, I have a few people in mind, but they all live here, and might not be instantly comfortable around him. Is he gonna whip someone over dropping a plate, or folding a cape wrong?”

“He is in no position to do so. And he never went so far back home, so I honestly doubt he would do so here. He knows full well the effect he has on the people of this world.”

“Anger and terror?”

“Pretty much.”

“Look. I'm not going to send him a servant. He'll get a maid, and nothing more. If he drives them off, he won't get a replacement. One chance. I'm not putting people at risk for his whims.”

“I couldn't ask for better than that. But time is of the essence my friend.”

“I better get some royal kickbacks for this.” Tony grumbled.

“I'll send you some Asgardian postage stamps.” Thor joked, leaving the lab.

Tony turned back to his desk, pulling up his holographic display. A short list of Greek letters that he'd been learning about popped back up.

“Okay, Theta.” He said. “Time to show me what you're worth.”

                                                                                *****

The fight started out as an accusation of theft. Florence had caught you with an Iron Muffin-a specialty of the ground floor coffee shop-which you had filched from the dumpster that morning. You'd tried to claim that you'd bought it, but then she'd demanded to see your receipt, and it had just escalated from there.

You were two words away from just quitting then and there, mostly so that she couldn't fire you, when Tony Stark had reached out of the elevator behind you, yanked you into it, waved goodbye to Florence, and shut the doors. As the elevator began to rise, you wiped a few angry tears out of your eyes, embarrassed that he had seen that.

You seemed altogether too prone to show this man your worst sides.

“I'm sorry sir.” You said. “Florence and I don't really get along.”

“She needs to be challenged sometimes. However, I am perfectly able to sass her myself, and I can't have disruption in the janitorial team. Can you imagine the uproar if the floors didn't get waxed properly at night?

Anyway, I thought we might chat about some of the information on your application.”

You were screwed. Could you be arrested for lying on an application?

“Oh geez. I'm sorry about that, but-”

“Yeah, I know. You have to write down an address, but you don't really have one, do you? But you can't leave it blank, so you improvise. I looked you up though. Your family seems to have a history of...shall we call them 'rebellious acts'?”

You hung your head. Fuck. He knew about that too.

“I'm not like them.” You muttered. “I'm not that stupid.”

“Sure hope not. Anyway, wanna tell me what a Theta is? Like, in your words.”

“You won't believe me.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“Nobody does.”

“I can fly. I've been finding things easier to believe since then.”

Well, that was fair. He was Iron Man. He'd been involved with aliens, and killer robots, and terrorists. Why would this be too weird?

“It's kinda like a Beta, but I have an Omega's sense of smell.”

“And Alpha's pheremones don't effect you. Right?”

“R-right...” How did he-?

“You presented me with a conundrum, and I couldn't leave it alone. I needed to find out what you meant, but it wasn't exactly easy. I had to get on tumblr to figure this out. I had to learn what a demi-omega was, to figure this out. I never thought I was out of touch, but damn if you young-uns haven't come up with some creative new lingo.”

“It's just that the world is more complex than a mark on a paper.” You said.

“Don't I know it!” He laughed. “But that's not too bad, is it? Not being overpowered by Alphas? Sounds nice.”

“It's not so bad, but most people think there's something wrong with me. It's not just the Alpha pheremones, I just don't feel-wait a minute, where are we going?”

The elevator had passed the labs, far above the highest floor you were supposed to be allowed to access.

“We're headed to the residential area. Me and Pep aren't the only ones who live up on the top floors. Top dozen or so are basically penthouses, though they aren't all consistently occupied these days.”

You remembered watching footage on the news of a fight at an airport. Avenger versus Avenger. It was terrible; both you and your old roommate had cried a little. It was an awful thing, watching your heroes come apart.

You were kind of glad you didn't have any superpowers or anything like that. You wouldn't want to be at the beck and call of any government, much less more than one. It was something you had actually agreed with your parents on.

“Why are we going up there? I'm not supposed to be here.”

“You're with me kid; you can be anywhere. And anyway, the best way to keep cats from fighting is to separate them. So, from now on, you are a maid.”

“A maid? I don't know how to be a maid, I just started being a janitor!” You protested, then told yourself to shut your trap and not argue with the boss for not firing you.

Tony shrugged. “What's different about being a maid? You still clean stuff, only it's a home instead of a museum. You might need to cook something every now and then. Can you cook?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“Not gonna lie; it's not a walk in the park. But it comes with a pay upgrade, and an apartment off the penthouse, so that's two of your problems solved.”

Suspicion began creeping in. This was all way to good to be true.

“Why me? You have to know that I'm not as qualified as the other janitors. What's the catch?”

“Well, the catch-” The elevator dinged. “Oh, look! We're here!”

The elevator doors opened. Standing right in front of them, in horned helmet and armor, stood Loki, the destroyer of New York.

[anneapocalypse]

Season 17 is a Fixer-Upper

A many-decker compliment sandwich.

Preface

Hi folks. Welcome back.

It's time to put this thing to bed.

If you have not read my season 15 and season 16 essays, you may want to read those first as I will be building on what I wrote there.

Season 15 of Red vs. Blue was written and directed by Joe Nicolosi as a standalone story arc picking up ten months after the end of season 13. Season 16, sub-titled "The Shisno Paradox" was directed by Joe Nicolosi and written by Joe Nicolosi and Jason Weight, as the first part of a multi-season story arc jumping off, but not directly connected to, the events of season 15.

Then, a mere two days before season 17 premiered, it was announced that Joe was no longer the creative lead on RvB, a decision that had been made months earlier but apparently kept under wraps. Season 17, sub-titled "Singularity," was written by Jason Weight, with two episodes written by Miles Luna and with Miles credited as "Head of Writing." It was co-directed by Josh Ornelas and Austin Clark.

This marks the first time in RvB history that the show has switched creative leads in the middle of a story arc. I can only speculate as to why this is. In the announcement, it was stated that Joe had been pulled to take the lead on an upcoming Rooster Teeth project (as yet, unannounced). This could be sole reason. It is also possible this decision was made for creative reasons pertaining to RvB specifically. Though fan reception to season 16 was… mixed, to say the least, that is something that happens pretty every time the show changes creative leads and so I don't think fan reception alone would be enough to force a change. If there were creative reasons, I think they must have come from within the company itself. But I can't say for sure that there were, so that's all I have to say about that.

Henceforth I will be referring to these three seasons together as "The Time Travel Trilogy." This arc doesn't have an official name as yet, but Miles used that phrase at the RvB panel at RTX and I think this is as good a name as any. In this essay, I want to discuss season 17 primarily but also this arc as a whole. Singularity is, ironically, not a singularity; it is not a standalone season. It cannot be separated from season 16, or even from 15, and I am as interested in how it works as a conclusion and how the trilogy works as a whole, as I am in how Singularity works on its own. So we have a lot of ground to cover here, but if you've read my previous writing about this arc, you already know that.

These are my personal opinions, you're welcome to disagree, please be civil and back up your arguments if you're going to argue, et cetera. You know the drill.

So let's get into it.

Does the Plot Matter?

Eh, yes and no? Bear with me here. I’m getting this part out of the way first because to me it matters the least, but I think it still bears mentioning. I said last season that while I'm interested in plot, because I am absolutely one of those fans who likes plot and cares about the plot making sense, Red vs. Blue has always been a character-driven show, and the show as a whole really does stand or fall on its character arcs. So while I do want to talk about the plot, this is not going to be an essay full of worldbuilding nitpicks. I'm frontloading this so we can move on to what really matters to me, the characters.

Where the plot matters is insofar as it drives the characters to action and meaningful development, and for that we do need a story that is at least… semi-coherent? We need at least enough context for character actions to be meaningful. It's possible to accomplish this with a plot that is silly, even a little nonsensical in places, and the Blood Gulch Chronicles pretty much exemplify this.

And yes, Blood Gulch does have a plot. It's meandering and it's silly, but it is a plot, because the characters have wants and needs and things happen that create conflicts out of those wants and needs, driving characters to act, and to succeed or fail. It's easy to say that nothing happens in season 1, the joke being that it's just people standing around talking. It's funny. It's also not strictly true. Church's primary motivation in Blood Gulch is his desire to keep Tex safe; Tex neither wants nor needs to be kept safe, and her involvement in the Red versus Blue conflict creates the main tension for the season. The season-long tension is resolved when Tex is "killed" by a grenade, but also freed from her aggressive AI, O'Malley. When Tex returns as a "ghost" on a mission to hunt down and kill O'Malley, the season 1 tension is escalated to the main tension of the Blood Gulch arc as a whole. Side plots are introduced to give other characters development as well, like Tucker's Great Journey, but make no mistake, everything in Blood Gulch does tie back into the main tension in some way, that tension being Church and Tex's relationship and their conflicting motivations.

And we would not care so much about those people standing around talking if we didn't have some kind of plot to drive them to action, and to give us context in which to interpret those actions.

That is why plot matters in a character-driven story. That is its function.

Season 17 is the back half of the story arc 16 began. Although I'm referring to 15-17 as a trilogy for simplicity's sake, season 15 really is its own story. You could compare it to Recollections in the sense that season 6, while a part of the Recollections Trilogy, is also a self-contained story arc, though season 6's story does tie into the arc of 7-8 much more directly, so the comparison is imperfect. The characterization in season 15 is relevant, but Temple's plot is unrelated to the plot of 16 and 17 except insofar as it provides two critical jumping-off points: the time machine through which Chrovos is able to influence Donut, and Wash's injury which will serve as a motivating factor later on. The Shisno Paradox and Singularity constitute their own story arc, which for brevity I'm going to call the Shisno arc.

Does season 17 have enough plot coherence to drive meaningful character development? I think that it does, and I think we'll see that when we get into talking about characters.

Of course, the devil is, as they say, in the details.

Cosmology Lessons

So let me, uh… try to summarize what happens in this arc. I'm going to try and lay out the events, not as they unfold to us, the viewers, but as they actually happen, for reasons that should become clear.

The Shisno arc presents a cosmic conflict between a group of AI self-styled as "the Cosmic Powers" and their creator and nemesis, the AI Chrovos, whom they have confined behind a firewall styled as a "cage." Unbeknownst to them, one of the Cosmic Powers, Genkins, is in fact Chrovos—or more accurately, Genkins later becomes Chrovos after a black hole carries him back to the beginning of the universe and he exists in space for billions of years (a fact Genkins himself does not yet know). At some point, he creates the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and at some later point, they decide he's dangerous and imprison him behind a firewall. Somehow, from behind that firewall, he's still able to remotely make contact with and influence humans. And give them physical time machines. And make them immune to harm by any of the other AI.

Yeah, you see how this is starting to kind of fall apart here?

And we haven't even gotten to the Reds and Blues' involvement yet.

Anyway, the Reds and Blues are caught up in this conflict when Donut falls under the influence of Chrovos (somehow, involving Loco's time-powered drilling machine) and distributes time travel devices to his friends with the vague directive to "change the past" in order to fix the future. To provoke them to action, Genkins has traveled back in time to prevent the invention of pizza. When Kalirama, another Cosmic Power, shows up to stop them, the Reds and Blues escape into the past in groups of two, where they make a number of changes. After being stranded in the past by Doc in his O'Malley personality, Grif is approached by Huggins, a sentient light being who serves the Cosmic Powers, and she convinces him that Chrovos is the real enemy, and he needs to find his friends and take action.

Eventually the group reunite and meet the Cosmic Powers, who warn them against any further time travel and urge them to help stop Chrovos by strengthening his prison. (Which apparently they can't do themselves for some reason.) But when a personal conflict comes to a head, the Reds and Blues decide they must defy the Cosmic Powers and time travel one last time to prevent Wash's injury at Temple's base.

This action creates a paradox.

It turns out that a temporal paradox does not simply destroy the fabric of spacetime, but rather create cracks in Chrovos's "cage." Which is a firewall, because Chrovos is an AI, but it can also… protect humans? and also it's… made of time? Such that damaging the timeline damages the cage?

Yeah, here the plot starts to crumble again. But let's try to keep going.

So the Reds and Blues' future consciousnesses (is that a word?) have been sent back to relive their pasts, because… just because. Once they become aware of this, however, they will be able to travel freely along the period of the timeline between Blood Gulch and Wash's injury. Genkins, meanwhile, is also freely time-traveling and strategically possessing AI along the way (mostly but not limited to Church) to make changes and cause further paradoxes, with the goal of setting Chrovos (aka his future self, but I don't think he knows that yet) free. The period of time immediately after Wash's injury now exists as two alternate realities happening concurrently in the same timeline (a la Schrödinger's cat).

By making Wash conscious of the paradox, Donut is able to collapse the waveform, so to speak, and snap the timeline to the reality where Wash wasn't injured. Wash then proceeds to help him wake up the others in the past; Huggins rejoins them and scouts ahead in time to find the paradoxes Genkins has created so that our heroes can find them and fix them.

Genkins, realizing what's happening, returns to Chrovos to demand more of her power (whatever that means in practical terms) in order to stop the Reds and Blues on the grounds that once they're dealt with, Chrovos will be able to reabsorb their power (again, whatever that means), only it turns out he's tricked her and he intends to take that power for himself, a brilliant move except for the fact that Genkins is Chrovos, but again, Genkins doesn't seem to know that yet.

When our heroes return to the original paradox to redo Wash's injury, Genkins intervenes, freezes time, stops the bullet, sends them all back to Blood Gulch where they can no longer freely traverse time, the Reds and Blues impale him with that golf club we saw in season 16 which it turns out is also some kind of AI-subduing weapon, and they're all transported to The Labyrinth that protects Chrovos from escaping, and the Labyrinth is the same as the firewall, or maybe it's different, it's not really clear, but either way it torments them with their own desires and fears and oh my god this is all so squirrelly I'm getting exhausted just trying to summarize it, anyway they defeat the Labyrinth through the power of friendship, Donut figures out the truth about Genkins, Genkins leaps into a black hole that takes him back to the beginning of the universe and after existing for billions of years and developing a God complex, he will be imprisoned by the "children" he at some point created.

Meanwhile the Reds and Blues repair the last paradox and return to Chorus together to visit Wash in the hospital, the fucking END.

So, okay.

What you might have noticed along the way here (and the reason I bothered trying to summarize all of that) is that there are a lot of mechanics of the universe in general and the Cosmic Powers in specific that don't make a lot of sense and are never really explained.

It's never really clear in season 16 why the Cosmic Powers can physically summon objects and affect physical environments, and while we're told that their power has limits, it still kind of far surpasses what an AI should logically be able to do, at least without some kind physical technology at their disposal. There are fan theories about this, and they involve a lot of Halo lore, and you can certainly make something like that work for a Watsonian reading. I have some theories of my own. As it stands, a lot is left pretty thoroughly unexplained in the canon. We're left to just kind of accept that the Cosmic Powers can do stuff, a lot of stuff, but not unlimited stuff. Things like the Cosmic Powers' physical appearances can be explained by holographic projections, but not everything they do can be explained that way.

Things get more squirrelly in season 17, and I think the time-cage-firewall-thing is really the least sensical of all of it. Are they breaking the universe or just the cage? We don't know. Is the cage made of time and how would that even work? We don't know. What will actually happen if Chrovos gets free? We don't know. Why does creating a paradox send the Reds and Blues back to relive their lives and why can they now time travel freely without a time machine? We don't know! They just can, okay? Those are the rules now.

In fact, this is the main purpose of season 17's first episode: setting up the rules of the plot.

Or… more like resetting them.

Because most of that stuff was not established in season 16.

I'm My Own Grandpa: The Villain in Plain Sight

Here's something positive: Genkins as a villain works on every level for me. Yes, even though the plot doesn't make sense.

In season 16, the signs were pretty much there all along that Genkins was out of step with the rest of the Cosmic Powers, and yet he also gave off the vibe that he was just shit-talking because he didn't care, so I never committed any serious suspicion to him, which made his villainy enough of a surprise to be exciting, while foreshadowed enough to be satisfying. It's a great example of hiding your villain in plain sight and I think it's one of the things in season 16 that really works. In fact, I consistently like Joe's original characters, most of whom function better in the stories he tells than the core cast—the latter being part of the problem.

Genkins continues to work in season 17! I don't know if Genkins becoming Chrovos was planned from the start, but it works, and it's one of the things I like best about 17's plot. It's an elegant solution to Chrovos' origins and identity that doesn't take a huge amount of time or exposition to establish.

It also allows the Cosmic Powers a brief cameo in this season. Personally, I wasn't missing them, as I never got attached to any of them as characters and I think with only twelve episodes, focusing on the core cast was absolutely the right decision. But I know some fans did enjoy them, so it's good to have at least a moment of resolution on their end.

Course Correcting

The sheer quantity of exposition dump in episode 1 is the first clue that season 17 is going to be a "fix-it" season. I'll admit, I initially kind of hated episode 1, to the point that it clinched my decision not to watch the season as it aired. It is largely characters explaining the plot, and most of that explanation still doesn't make a lot of sense.

But what's noteworthy to me is that this episode is already overtly responding to season 16 criticism. When Genkins says,

What should we do with the Shisno? And incidentally, who named them Shisno anyway? It's a derogatory term for 'human' right?

That could be something I said. Actually I'm pretty sure it is something I said.

And there are a few other things just in Episode 1 that seem like direct responses to fan reception of season 16. "A hammer than makes prisons! Ridiculous!" Genkins declares, kicking last season's McGuffin off into space. Even female!Chrovos seems like a response to fan disappointment with Kalirama's minor role in the story.

This is just the beginning. Throughout season 17, we will see a focus on reframing, repairing, and resolving things from the previous season—most notably characterization and character relationships.

Look, the plot is a mess. It is dumb as rocks. But it is doing its best to drive motivated character development while staying functionally continuous with season 16, and as a lode-bearing feature, that is what the plot of this season needs to do.

Also, the ending pretty much explicitly says that what they had to do to save the day was to in-universe retcon all of season 16, which is from an in-universe perspective pretty squirrelly and from an out-of-universe perspective really funny.

But the biggest reason I'm cool with the plot nonsense this season is that for the first time in this arc, no one is holding the idiot ball. There is no point at which conflict feels forced, or at which I feel like anyone is acting uncharacteristically stupid, petty, or mean in the interest of furthering the plot. Characteristically so, sure! It's Red vs. Blue. But never unbelievably. Never to a degree that it feels contrived. It does make use of the "time-traveling character thinks out loud in front of other characters who don't know what's going on despite the fact that it might really fuck things up to do so," which gives me terrible secondhand embarrassment, but y'know. It's a dialogue-based show. I get why it's in there. And it doesn't end up mattering at all, so.

This season's plot is dumb but functional. And most importantly, the characters are driving the plot, not the other way around.

So, speaking of which, who's flying the plane?

The Protagonist Problem, Revisited

There’s been a lot of discussion these past three seasons about protagonists. I’ve discussed it myself in both of my previous full season essays. I think this comes up so much now because season 15 lacked a clear lead among the core cast, leading fans to ask: who could have been the protagonist? Who should be? Who would we like to see in the future?

The Time Travel Trilogy is unique among Red vs. Blue arcs in that it does not have one overarching protagonist. Blood Gulch has Church, Recollections has Wash, Freelancer has Carolina, and Chorus has Tucker. The Time Travel Trilogy has Dylan, then sort of Grif, then Donut. Not only are these protagonists and their arcs disconnected from one another, they aren’t all complete arcs. Dylan’s and Donut’s are; Grif’s is not. We’ll get to that.

A lot of fans have wanted to see Red Team get more attention. I think the Red Team characters are just as deserving of character development as any other characters, if that’s the question.

But I think maybe from a storytelling standpoint, which characters deserve to be protagonists is the wrong question.

Sarge and Caboose are great characters, and they would both make awful protagonists for almost any serious storyline. This isn’t a failing of the characters. It doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of attention or screen time, even of character growth or backstory. But neither of them have the kind of motivation that lends itself well to driving a serious plot. They both have excellent supporting motivation, which can either impede or assist the rest of our heroes in their progress depending on the mood. But they aren’t the right characters to be driving serious plot. I don't want to say they could never, under any circumstances, be protagonists, because then that just sounds like a challenge—but in both cases you would need a very specific kind of story to make it work, and it would need to be tailored to the character and probably not take itself too seriously.

And there was a time when I would've said the same for Donut. But that's changed, and I think it's changed for the better. We'll get to that! I have a lot of positive things to say about Donut's character development.

First I want to talk about Red Team in general.

Red Team Problems

The expression "Blue Team Problems" exists on this show for a reason. Blue Team have traditionally been the purveyors of Plot in this show, thanks to their more direct connections to Project Freelancer. Blue Team had Church and by extension Tex (twice). Wash was adopted onto Blue Team, and later Carolina (and yes, all respect to Red Team Carolina headcanons but canonically she is a Blue). Tucker took up the protagonist mantle on Chorus, and that was far from Tucker's first time driving plot; as Grif once put it, "I'm not the one who grabs swords and fucks aliens."

Red Team's avenue into the plot has traditionally been simply by way of their proximity to Blue Team. For the first ten seasons, the plot revolves around Project Freelancer, and none of the Reds have any personal connection to Project Freelancer beyond being sim troopers. It's no surprise that for those first ten seasons our protagonists were characters with very direct connections to Freelancer: Church, Wash, and Carolina. Tucker only had his turn once the story moved away from Freelancer.

So it definitely makes sense to see this as a permanent move away from Freelancer-adjacent characters driving the plot, and toward letting the sim trooper characters have a go. And the truth is, we're kind of running out of Blues here. The only surviving Blues who haven't already been protagonists are Caboose and Kaikaina. Caboose is a great supporting character; his motivations as they stand now are a bit too one-note to be protagonist material. Kaikaina's not out of the question, but she's also been around the least out of the core cast, and her VA's availability has not historically been guaranteed, so at present I think she too works best as a supporting character.

Thus it makes perfect sense that we might start taking a closer look at Red Team.

If Tucker was the obvious choice for a sim trooper protagonist on Blue Team because of his prior capability and character development, Grif is pretty much that to a T on Red Team. Prior to the Time Travel Trilogy, Grif's had easily the most character growth of anyone on Red Team.

Simmons has plenty to work with in terms of motivation, with his array of anxieties and personal hang-ups, but he's kind of noticeably lacking in meaningful growth (something fans have very much noticed). He still has Dad issues, he's still afraid to talk to girls, he's still kind of a kiss-ass. If anything about Simmons has noticeably changed beyond the general increase in capability across all the Blood Gulch characters, it's his relationship to Grif, wherein we began to see signs as early as season 6 that they really do care about each other. But when it comes to Simmons himself, his growth has been pretty thin thus far.

Donut, as of season 13, had seen… about the same amount of meaningful growth as Simmons, which is to say almost none, except that Donut had even less screentime and never got a promotion to Captain. (We'll get to Donut in a bit. We'll talk about our boy plenty, don't you worry.)

Even Sarge has seen some growth over the years. His most dramatic character moment has been the revelation that his military career was a lie, but the most noticeable growth over time has to be his willingness to work with the Blues and his increased affection for his own men. He even learns to care about people outside his own team; remember that it's Sarge who remarks with distaste on the "thousands of deaths" they would allow to happen should they accept the mercs' offer of safe passage off Chorus. Sarge is still Sarge: he's still gruff, he still longs for a good fight even knowing the Red versus Blue conflict is fake, he still occasionally jokes about killing Grif. But he does show a bit of increased self-awareness and the wisdom to know a real fight when he sees one. For all that, though, I still think Sarge is similar to Caboose in that his motivations are fairly one-note, and he works best as a supporting character.

Grif is characterized early on as the lazy one on Red Team—the one who is the least motivated and takes things the least seriously. But over many seasons we see things that challenge the surface-level reading of Grif: the fact that he's promoted to Sergeant as soon as he's transferred away from Blood Gulch (and Sarge), his surprising willingness to go on a mission to the desert with Caboose, his own declaration that he's not actually lazy but simply doesn't want to take orders from people he doesn't respect. In fact, in hindsight, it's easy to see Grif as the savviest person on Red Team with regard to their situation. Most of Red Team is characterized by taking themselves and their situation extremely seriously even when no one else does. But it's Grif who remarks, right from day one, that this, "fighting a bunch of blue guys," is not what he signed up for. Grif realizes intuitively, before anyone else on Red Team, that their mission does not matter. When something matters—such as Caboose potentially wandering off and getting himself killed—suddenly Grif cares, even if he'd be loathe to admit it.

This tension between Grif's actual motivations and his distaste for meaningless conflict and authority reaches an interesting turning point on Chorus, when Grif is forced into a leadership position with actual stakes. Where Tucker's internal conflict is his fear of failure, Grif's fear is of becoming the kind of leader he himself cannot respect. This culminates in Grif's unexpected agreement with Tucker's rescue plan. Unexpected by Simmons, at any rate. If you remembered season 7 Grif, you might not have been surprised by this at all.

Simmons: That's your plan? We just show up and wing it? That's the worst plan I've ever—

Grif: All right. Let's do it.

Simmons: What? Grif? You wanna do this?

Grif: Yeah. So what?

Simmons: So what? You never wanna do anything. Ever!

Grif: Simmons, I've been following orders I never liked for years.

Simmons: No, you haven't. You disobey orders all the time!

Grif: Well, I don't wanna be the guy who gives shitty orders that nobody wants to follow! I will not become a Sarge, damn it! There's no way I'm making a bunch of stupid rebels get shot for something I want. So yeah, whatever. Let's just do it.

So with already the most complex motivations and the most prior development of anyone on Red Team, Grif was kind of the obvious choice for our next protagonist.

The Big Short: Grif’s Incomplete Character Arc

And so, given the obvious similarities between Grif and Tucker in terms of character growth, and with Tucker's protagonist arc completed with Chorus, naturally season 15 gave the protagonist spot to…

Dylan Andrews, a brand new character.

Oh. Hm.

Well, Grif spends most of season 15 absent, and to the best of my understanding this had to do with Geoff Ramsey's availability during the season (he took a sabbatical in 2017). Joe found a way not only to work around Grif's absence but to integrate it into the story in a way that I think works conceptually pretty well and effectively draws on his established motivations.

We are supposed to be done! I don't want to go on another adventure! I don't want to listen to Sarge! I don't want to get shot at! I don't want to shoot at other people! I want to chill! I want to sit and chill.

Grif is exhausted with adventure, and frustrated by the fact that nobody seems to care what he wants in all this mess. He says some insensitive things for sure, like "Fuck Church!" and "Why can't he just stay dead?" to his friends who are still clearly grieving. They say some insensitive things right back, calling him lazy and selfish. And when they leave on their mission, Grif stays behind, only returning to the story when Locus arrives with the message that his friends are in trouble.

In season 16, Grif's motivation resets right back to not wanting adventure, with one critical change: he is now nominally the protagonist. I say "nominally" because while I definitely believe Grif was supposed to be the lead for season 16, the season's central conflict really doesn't have anything to do with Grif personally beyond… pizza. (Donut's involvement with Chrovos, by comparison, is far more personal.) It doesn't really advance Grif's character development beyond convincing him to take action (again), and it doesn't develop Grif's relationship to his friends at all. In fact Grif's new friendship with Huggins gets more screentime than his friendship with Simmons, the only relationship of his that really saw any growth the previous season.

I covered last year why Grif's arc in 15 doesn't feel complete in the season 16 essay, and I don't want to rehash all of that here. But suffice it to say, that interpersonal conflict never really feels resolved. To quote myself:

So Grif’s arc in season 15 only resolves in the sense that he reunites with his friends, returning to the status quo. His relationship to his friends, with the exception of Simmons, does not change, his need is only partially fulfilled, and his want is unfulfilled. So he begins season 16 with the same want… and his arc basically resets from the beginning, except that this time his separation from his friends is involuntary. Yet again, he finds his wants belittled and dismissed, only this time it’s by Doc instead of Sarge and the Blues.

For Grif to have a truly satisfying resolution to his arc, I think we really need to see his friends express in some way that they value him as much as we can tell he values them.

Unfortunately in 17, Grif's protagonist run is clearly over, and he doesn't get much screentime at all outside of the ensemble scenes. Huggins is alive and Grif gets to be happy about that, at least. He shoots down Tex's ship to fix the timeline, something that definitely wouldn't have enraged Church and broken the timeline even further. His relationship with Simmons develops not at all, and he gets two significant scenes in the Labyrinth at the end, one by himself and one with his sister.

So let's talk about that Labyrinth.

In Grif's personal Labyrinth scene, we see him at the mercy of a sadistic gym teacher forcing him to run an obstacle course. This seems to reflect an experience from Grif's early life, which, in his own words, "made me hate effort itself!" When he finds Kaikaina in the Labyrinth to rescue her from her own nightmare, he makes a startling confession: he was never drafted for the war, but voluntarily enlisted. (Grif being drafted has never explicitly been stated on the show, by the way; it was in a set of character profiles from the season 5 DVD extras, many of which have already been retconned, and it was a Word of God statement from Geoff. Nevertheless it was something a lot of fans had come to accept as canon.)

Fan reception to this scene seems to have been… mixed. Some, I think, have appreciated that the obstacle course scene dug into the possible roots of Grif's hatred for power-tripping authority figures and meaningless effort, and I can appreciate that too—I think that scene makes this point well. And taken together, I think the obstacle course and the enlistment confession do offer some real insight into Grif's character: he learned to hate meaningless effort and authority at a young age, and he enlisted, it's implied, to find structure and purpose that was meaningful—only to be shunted off to Project Freelancer's simulation program, where he found no such thing. This ties right back into what Grif says in season 1: "I signed on to fight some aliens. Next thing I know… I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting a bunch of blue guys." This lines up well with what we've seen of Grif over the years. And I think it does an even better job than season 15 of contextualizing when and why Grif hates effort.

It just doesn't have anything to do with Grif's relationship to his friends.

So why is that Grif doesn't get that kind of emotional resolution, the kind Donut gets—wherein he gets apologies and his feelings respected?

Well, I think the answer is that Joe just didn't see that as the conflict he was setting up, and I think that becomes very clear when you look back at how season 15 plays out. It's why no one but Grif ever apologizes. If the only problem to be solved is Grif not wanting to go on the adventure, then that problem is resolved when Grif goes on the adventure. If the problem is Grif, and no one else, then it's Grif who has to come around, Grif who has to apologize for forgetting what kind of story he's in, for selfishly and wrongly wanting something for himself.

So, Grif was wrong, Grif apologized, character arc over. And season 16 offers no follow-up, no emotional resolution, but simply rinses and repeats: Grif refuses the call to adventure, Grif becomes convinced of the need for action, Grif accepts the call and acts. Also, he gets a sword, proving he's as cool as Tucker.

Character arc complete! That's a wrap, bring it in folks.

For many Grif fans, though, it's a bit more complicated, as I laid out last season.

See, Joe thought Grif was cool, way cooler than stupid Tucker. But for all his determination to prove to us how cool Grif was by tearing Tucker down next to him… it seems like he didn't actually care very much about Grif's emotional core. That Grif is motivated when he wants to be, but that nothing will make him shut down and go full Bartleby on everyone's ass faster than feeling disrespected.

Instead Grif's inertia was just a problem that had to be solved by getting him motivated. How he was treated by those around him wasn't part of the equation and didn't matter. Joe didn't know how to make Grif a protagonist without tearing apart the core of who he was—and that ties back to Joe's difficulties with giving meaningful growth to established characters.

Joe misread Grif, and he misread the desire of Grif fans, and of Red Team fans generally, to see their faves in the lead. But I point back once again to that protagonist problem. Grif was, after Chorus, the right choice for the next protagonist among the core cast. A lot of fans saw that and they wanted a Red Team driven plot. But at the heart of that was a desire for Red Team character growth.

Season 16 technically was a Red Team driven plot, yes. But it missed the boat on character growth and missed it hard. Because Joe could see that Red Team was cool, but he missed the heart. He missed what makes Grif so compelling to fans in the first place.

So when Jason took over writing, I think he did set out to resolve Grif's arc—the arc that Joe believed he was setting up. If Grif's arc was about Grif hating effort, and then coming around to taking action, then his arc resolves with him facing down some truths in his own past about why he hates effort in the first place. I think when it comes to that tension, Jason's resolution to it was actually a bit more nuanced than Joe's setup, more clearly illustration what kind of effort and authority Grif hates and why.

It is a resolution.

But it's not a resolution to the tension that a lot of Grif fans felt was the more important one: the hate glue, Grif's relationship to his friends and how they, specifically, treat him. That's why to a lot of fans, Grif's arc doesn't feel resolved, where Donut's does.

I can both appreciate the effort that was made, and also feel that Grif's emotional arc is still incomplete.

I personally hope that Grif's not passed over for character development or even a protagonist role in future seasons, because I think Red Team fans kind of got monkey's pawed with his role in this trilogy. And if Donut is any indication, it's never too late to return to a neglected character and give them some much-needed resolution.

More like Do-nut!

Probably season 17's most smashing success is in proving that Donut can not only grow as a character, but carry a storyline.

Donut has been central to the Shisno arc since it began, but he had far less screentime in season 16, appearing more as a quest giver and briefly as a soft antagonist before ultimately choosing to side with his friends. Most critically, though, season 16 laid the groundwork to give Donut the necessary motivation and character growth to take the lead in this season. Whether that was originally intended or not, it works. In fact, I think I would have been quite disappointed if the setup for Donut's character development hadn't been paid off in this season, because if you read my season 16 essay you'll recall that I very much felt it wasn't paid off there.

Season 17 more than remedies this. In fact, functionally, when looking at this arc as a whole, I think it makes more sense to see Donut as the overarching protagonist. We could compare it to Wash in seasons 7 and 8. Wash isn't even seen until late season 7, and most of the season focuses on Red Team's antics, Tucker in the desert, and Epsilon's rebirth. Even Wash's return in Valhalla is shown from Simmons and Donut's point of view. But when we look back at Recollections as a whole, it's clearly a Wash-centric arc. Likewise, while Donut has less screen time in season 16, and the point of view is centered around the rest of the core cast and their adventures, it is ultimately Donut's actions that set the plot in motion, and it is Donut who has the first and most direct connection to the Cosmic Powers, via Chrovos.

So with the rest of our heroes now lost in time, the story re-centers around Donut's point of view. Plot-wise, I do think this was the right call. This plot centers more around Donut than any other character, Grif included, and having now made the choice to turn against Chrovos, Donut was the logical choice to carry us to the finish line. And that's not to cast aside other characters who may or may not have gotten the character development they needed, only to say, this is Donut's story and it was right that he got to finish it.

Donut works as a protagonist, and Donut also works here as Donut. A big part of the success of this season is not just putting Donut in the spotlight, but understanding who Donut is, looking for the unrealized potential in that, and letting Donut's own growth carry the story forward.

See, Donut's first primary character trait was being oblivious.

I know what you're thinking. "But Anne, isn't it the innuendo thing? Everybody knows that." Indeed. But go back and rewatch the Blood Gulch Chronicles, and you may notice that the accidental innuendo doesn't really develop for a season or two. One of the first things Donut does is fall for a classic military prank, walk into Blue Base thinking it’s the “store,” and buy the flag.

And the obliviousness never really goes away. It's still there in season 10 when Donut doesn't recognize Wash in his blue armor.  It's arguably even there implicitly in season 12 when Donut and Wash are being held captive and Donut doesn't appear to notice or care that he's standing next to the man who shot him.

The obliviousness also goes hand in hand with a kind of benign self-absorption. We see this in Blood Gulch when Donut exclaims to a wounded Tucker, "You can't die! I'm bored! All these girls wanna talk about is chick stuff! And not the fun chick stuff, like ribbons and unicorns. Boring stuff, like oppression and a hostile work environment." We see it in season 7, when Donut thinks the Meta is a friend of Simmons', and gets indignant about not being introduced, completely missing the fact that the Meta is attacking them. We see it in season 11 when Donut and Doc fly all the way to Chorus to respond to the gang's distress call, and then send their ride away.

But the critical point is that when Donut gets his pink armor, the joke is that Donut doesn’t initially realize his armor is pink. And it's only over time that this joke morphs into "Donut is effeminate," and then into "everything Donut says is sexual." In the logic of the show's humor, pink = feminine = gay = hypersexual. Yeah, not so great when I lay it out like that, is it? But that's how we got from headlight fluid and Donut buying the Blue flag to where we are now.

And I bring this up, not to critique the poorly-aged humor from which the show has at least somewhat moved on, but to point out that innuendo is not all there is to Donut and it never has been. If it feels like it is, it's because Donut has undergone some Flanderization over the years, and most critically, since his return in season 10 he's had no character growth to challenge that characterization and no major role in the plot for which a writer might need to do so.

See, Donut being self-absorbed and oblivious to everything going on around him made him a character who never had to be taken seriously. If the Reds make fun of Donut, ignore him, and so forth, but Donut never really seems to notice or care, then it’s fine. If the others are dismissive of Donut's needs but he's also pretty dismissive of theirs in kind, it's fine. If Wash shot Donut, and Donut seems to hold like, a humorous kind of grudge again "that jerk Washington," but either doesn't notice or doesn't care that Wash is still around, then it's fine. It's fine. This is fine. It's fine! He's fine. This is fine. It's fine.

Well, except a lot of fans have been saying for years that maybe it's not fine. But narratively and tonally, it's not been framed as a problem that needed solving.

But the moment you have Donut express that he doesn’t like the way his friends treat him and it makes him feel bad—well, now you have tension. Now you have a conflict that needs to be resolved.

This is actually the root of my problem with season 13 Doc, which I brought up in my season 16 essay. Everyone forgetting about Doc in season 13, and Doc being upset about that, raises a conflict that is never resolved. His friends never do change or address the way they treat him, it's mostly treated as a joke, and it doesn't come up again in the Chorus arc. In fact that conflict returns in season 15, when Doc sides with the Blues and Reds—and I'll give Joe credit for that, he saw an unresolved thread and he ran with it. But we'll come back to Doc.

So Donut needed attention like this. In fact the development Donut gets is one of the things that does feel truly continuous with season 16. And while I remain discontented with Grif's incomplete arc, I can see clearly here the challenged faced by a writer picking up where 16 left off, and given only twelve episodes in which to wrap up a lot of threads. I think a season could've been made that gave both characters the resolution they needed. But it probably couldn't have been made in twelve episodes. Jason probably had to make some tough calls.

And I just can't bring myself to be sorry we got the Donut development we did, because it's so good.

I know some fans might be disappointed that Trollnut (the theory that Donut’s innuendos haven't been accidental and he’s been deliberately trolling everyone the whole time) is now explicitly not canon, at least not in the past. As funny as that interpretation was, I think the way Jason took it plays far better with Donut’s classic characterization: he's just kind of oblivious. Not just of what's going on around him, but of how he comes across to other people.

And with that as the starting point, I think the freshly-gained self-awareness works as character growth and is an effective way to propel Donut to a more active role in the story and begin to challenge and grow his relationships with the others. If there's anything that maybe gets a little lost in this take on Donut, it's that benign self-absorption, but I think even that might be implicitly acknowledged in Donut making a conscious attempt to work on the way he talks—becoming aware of how he's perceived, realizing that he's been making people uncomfortable without realizing it. I think it's a thread that could have been developed a touch more—Donut is not, after all, an innocent character who's never wronged anyone before this arc—but again, this season had limited space to do all it needed to, and I'm certainly not unhappy with what we did get.

There is an earnestness to Donut that I do not think is inconsistent with previous characterization but which comes through much more strongly in 16 and especially 17, and provides a believable foundation for serious motivations. And that earnestness dovetails nicely with his increasing self-awareness. It doesn't follow that he'll never be funny again—the innuendo does return in places once he's convinced the others to take him seriously where it matters, and I don't think we need to worry that Donut won't be recognizably Donut from here on out. But this season taps into a depth of sincerity and even vulnerability for Donut that we haven't seen before.

As a sidenote, I was actually relieved to hear Donut finally swear again when trying to get his friends' attention, as that's something that's been bugging me since last season. If you take a look at Donut's dialogue in the past, he swears plenty; it was Doc who would use softer euphemisms. I can only assume that Donut stopped cursing when he found God; maybe Chrovos doesn't like strong language or something. Hopefully that will go back to normal now that his connection with Chrovos is over.

Donut in this arc is a doer. Even in season 16, as an agent of Chrovos, he's doing what he thinks is right, and in 17, it's his actions that save the others—and ultimately challenge the way everyone else sees him.

The stakes of the plot may be nonsensical. But the stakes that matter to us, the fans, are those of character growth and character relationships, and it is there that season 17 vitally succeeds. Perhaps the real success here is that Donut's arc unites action and emotional resolution in a way Grif's arc did not. His resolving things with his friends—getting them to listen to him, hearing their apologies, coming around to maybe forgiving them—directly ties into his role in the plot, because he needs them to take him seriously to wake them up. Donut's plot motivation and his personal motivation can't be separated from one another, and they both find resolution in the end with Chrovos' defeat.

Most notably, Wash and Donut see a resolution to their history that has been a long time in coming.

If this season set out to prove that Donut could be a protagonist, I think it was a great success. It's a great example of how to grow a comedic character into a serious plot role without robbing them of who they are and why audiences love them.

Well done, sir. Chef's kiss.

The Wash Revival

Speaking of Wash, man, isn't it great to see Wash, like… doing stuff?

I wrote last year about how frustrating it was to see Wash basically treated like a crash dummy for two seasons, and season 17 remedies this with flying colors. When Donut rescues him from Schrödinger's Hypoxia, Wash becomes not only conscious but an active agent in the story. On a plot level, he works with Donut to wake up the others where they are adrift in the Everwhen; on a personal level, he finds meaningful resolution both with Donut and with Carolina.

I think Jason did a really brilliant job of using humor to highlight the absurdity of Wash and Donut's situation—with Donut getting shot over and over as they both keep inadvertently jumping to the same moment in time. That they become literally stuck in a loop they must break out of symbolizes the need for resolution between them.

Wash, at long last, not only takes real responsibility for his past actions but becomes a friend to Donut. More than a friend—Wash is both ally and advocate for Donut, standing up for him when the rest of his friends are still inclined to dismiss him. For the first time in a long time, Donut has someone in his corner. And so when he travels back to Blood Gulch to confront the others, he's not alone.

Wash's own journey through time mirrors Donuts struggle. We see Wash relive a moment in his past when he felt truly alone, with no one in his corner—Recovery One. We see Wash in the Freelancer era struggling to be taken seriously, and finally asking himself in exasperation, "Is this how Donut feels all the time?" It's a moment that builds empathy for Wash, and I think it also serves as a small but poignant way nod to the story of season 15. The Freelancer relates to the sim trooper—sees him as he is, a real person with feelings. This has been a part of Wash's journey for a long time, really ever since his adoption into Blue Team, highlighted by his sticking up for them in season 10 and again in his relationship with Tucker in season 11. But it was an unfinished journey, until Wash found that resolution with Donut specifically. It's really wonderful to see that finally happen.

It's great to see Wash finally taking an active role in the story again. But it's just as important that that action is about supporting Donut first and foremost, with Wash's character development as secondary. I've said before that you don't need to put the Freelancers in the spotlight to give them character development, they just need to be active in a supporting role, and Wash's relationship to Donut in season 17 does that incredibly well.

It would be easy to just stop there—I think Wash is for the most part handled very well this season. But I do want to talk about where this is going in the future, because the ending of season 17 indicates that things are about to change for Wash—though it's hard to say exactly how much.

The Follow-Through

I was not fond of the contrived conflict between Wash and Carolina in season 16, to say the least, but the portrayal of Wash's condition itself I thought was pretty decent. He hadn't lost any of his core personality, and it was pretty clear when and how his memory lapses were affecting him—repeating himself, forgetting how he got where he was, confusion and irritability due to that confusion, etc. While I had issues with the framing of the situation to put Carolina at fault, the effects of the cerebral hypoxia itself were not done badly, and I wasn't sorry to see Wash's injury have some real consequences given how little narrative purpose it served in season 15.

What we see of Wash in " Schrödingin'" before Donut wakes him up and snaps him back to his uninjured timeline… very much does not reflect the condition we saw in season 16. It doesn't indicate memory loss or confusion so much as just… uh, weirdness? And because it was also part of the general weirding of the timeline, I'm kind of willing to let that slide and assume it was purely for comedy and not meant to be of much consequence because Donut was about to snap him out of it anyway. That said, I really hope it is not representative of what we can expect for Wash going forward, and I think I am justified in feeling a bit of trepidation about that.

I think it needs to be kept in mind that Wash is an important character to a lot of fans. He's already seen some big ups and downs in terms of characterization and not all of it has sat well with fans, from the Freelancer characterization that makes Wash appear not just naive but clumsy and inept, to the Fan Guide interview that more or less directly contradicts that naivety, to his extremely passive role in the past two seasons. One can bring up continuity in this context, but it's not simply about whether you can explain away these wild swings in characterization. I've said it before, I'll say it again: you can make up an explanation for just about anything if you're creative. Fans do it all the time. I do it myself. And it's also to be expected that longtime fans will be resistant to new canon that challenges their interpretations of characters they love.

But what fans really want, I think, is for the heart of the character to stay intact.

And as the character who introduced RvB's first serious storyline, Wash should not start behaving like, say, Caboose (whom I bring up because he is the other character who canonically has brain damage). We already have a Caboose. Wash is Wash. And he can be Wash even while dealing with a serious injury. I want to be very clear here that this isn't me saying Wash can't be funny, or that there shouldn't be humor around him managing his condition. I'll point back to what I said above about Donut getting repeatedly shot—it's a great example of how humor can be used to approach a serious problem.

I'm just saying: let Wash continue to be Wash. After all, that is the point of what he says to Carolina, right? He's not dying. He's not even going away. He'll still be Wash. He's just going to have some memory problems—and it's not exactly like Wash hasn't dealt with things like that before. Furthermore, I think realistically he's going to have a much easier time dealing with it when his friends know and can support him.

Wash has undergone one of the longest and most complex character arcs on this show, and one critical part of that arc only just saw resolution, so to then turn Wash into a character who is too goofy to be taken seriously or to have active agency in the story would be… a huge mistake. That doesn't have to happen. And it shouldn't.

I'll admit I'm apprehensive, but I think this can be done well.

You're My Best Friend

You may recall last year I was very pessimistic about Wash and Carolina getting resolution. And I don't think that fear was unwarranted, based on the precedent set by Joe's writing. But Jason more than surpassed my expectations.

We're going to be talking about Carolina here, so full disclosure for anyone to whom it wasn't already extremely obvious: Carolina's my favorite character. Not my favorite character in RvB, my favorite character in anything. I can't remove that bias but I can acknowledge it. Her arc has always resonated with me a lot and her relationship with Wash has always been important to me as well, both for the ways in which they mirror one another and the ways in which they are very different.

So when I say that, for example, it's tough to hear Wash be angry at Carolina, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing that he is. Given the circumstances, his anger is reasonable. It's easier on a rewatch, knowing the resolution is coming.

And actually one of my favorite lines this season comes when Wash is very much still angry at Carolina—when he says, "When you get injured and your best friend lies to you, makes you into a secret invalid, I'll hear you out, I promise. …Friends talk to each other. They trust each other. I thought we were closer than that." He's mad at Carolina because he cares so much about their relationship, because he thinks of her as the person he's closest to, and she kept something important from him and he doesn't understand why. And I think that's really the best reframing of this situation we could possibly get, without retconning it altogether.

Donut points out to Wash the lengths to which Carolina was willing to go to help him despite her mistakes. But I think what really gets through to Wash is his own time travel experiences, and the perspective he gains through seeing Carolina at different points in her life.

The Freelancer-era bit is… rocky, and we'll come back to why. For now suffice it to say that while Carolina ignoring Wash in an almost comically-dismissive manner does further the development of Wash's relationship with Donut, it doesn't particularly reflect Wash's relationship with Carolina at any point we ever saw in Freelancer. Put a pin in it.

The critical point is when Wash finds Carolina during her missing years.

This is, arguably, Carolina at her lowest point. Lower than the time after CT's death, lower than present-day season 10, which I've argued before should probably be seen as a step up from her years in hiding, in the broader context of her whole journey. Carolina is alone—working under a false identity, in a generic suit of armor (which I'm well aware was a choice made due to Halo 2 limitations but it's also brilliant, for reasons we'll get into later). When Wash finds her, she is alone at her post. From what her CO says, she is an oddity in her unit and probably doesn't have many friends if any. Even the weapon she's holding, a sniper rifle, speaks of solitude and distance.

Carolina has no one in her corner right now.

There's the parallel to Donut, and to Wash.

And though she responds with anger and suspicion—unsurprising, given the circumstances—Wash responds with compassion.

It's really significant here what Wash goes through just to find out where Carolina was. It means that in all the time they've been together since Freelancer, she never once told him and he never once asked. And that right there—the absence of that knowledge shared between them, tells us far more about these characters, about their relationship, about Wash and about Carolina individually, than any implied backfill that Wash just already knew would have done.

And notice that when Wash does ask Carolina, on Iris… she just tells him. Like she's perfectly okay with him knowing, and maybe would have been, even before that. But it just never came up. Wash probably never wanted to pry, Carolina doesn't volunteer painful things about herself, and neither of them are good with… emotional stuff.

Oddly enough, it's this, this small meaningful exchange on their vacation moon, that makes me almost kind of okay with their season 16 subplot, in the hindsight of their reconciliation. Because it serves to highlight what was still missing from Wash and Carolina's relationship. They've built teamwork, trust, and a genuine friendship in their time together since Carolina's return. They're both part of this odd little family called the Reds and Blues; both of them would absolutely go to the wall to protect this family and one another. That much has been clear since Chorus.

But they never really talked. Not about their shared history, their feelings. Not about the elephant in the room, Epsilon, the AI they both knew in sharply different ways. The difficult things. Their season 15 conversation touched their history, briefly, but didn't go much further than York.

So when something happened where they really, badly needed to talk, Carolina just… didn't. She stayed faithfully by Wash's side during his recovery—kept him company, helped him get his strength back, all the things that didn't require difficult conversations—and she hoped that would be enough. It wasn't.

I do still think it was unfair, from a meta standpoint, to create a conflict between them specifically to be all Carolina's fault, because we know from history that Wash isn't much better at talking about difficult things than Carolina is, and a conflict arising from a genuine misunderstanding between the two of them would have made this point a lot more effectively. But I can appreciate the point all the same.

And going forward, it seems like Wash and Carolina's friendship has ultimately been strengthened by this. Not just by Carolina's apology or their reconciliation, but by Wash gaining a deeper insight into everything she's been through. And this sympathy is especially meaningful coming from Wash, who's been through a lot himself, and generally garners a lot more sympathy from fans.

Your life, Carolina. You've survived things that would've broken me. Broken anyone. Do you even know how far you've come? Carolina, you are so cool. I am so proud of you. I'm always gonna be your friend.

For a subplot that started out as my absolute least favorite thing in season 16, this sure did wrap up as my favorite part of 17, and that says a lot. I can't overstate how grateful I am for it.

And speaking of things I'm grateful for.

The Lost Years: What This Season Adds

It will come as no surprise to my regular readers that I've always had sort of a fascination with what I call Carolina's Lost Years—where she went, what she was doing, what her emotional state was, who if anyone knew that she was alive, what made her decide to come back, etc. And until this season, it was kind of up to us as fans to fill in that huge blank space in her backstory.

That's seven solid years of headcanons you're facing down. There's an inherent risk in adding backfill this late in the game.

I want to be clear that new canon not lining up with fans' headcanons does not mean that the new canon is bad. Sure, it might be risky to tackle something that's been left open-ended for so long, but that doesn't in itself mean it should never be done, or that it's automatically wrong if it doesn't line up with fanon. Sometimes writers do fumble on these things (lookin' at you, Fan Guide Wash!); sometimes fans have gotten so entrenched in their own headcanons that they respond with not only disappointment but anger to new canon that challenges their interpretations. And we should be honest with ourselves that there isn't always a clear line separating the one from the other—just look at the controversies around Star Wars. (Please don't ask me what I think about Star Wars; thanks in advance.)

Similarly, the challenge for a longtime fan who has spent a lot of time thinking about these characters and their stories, interpreting them, writing about them, theorizing, and so forth, is to remain open to new canon that might challenge one's interpretations without necessarily being bad writing or a retcon. And I will be the first to admit, this can be really hard. For the split second I thought Sharkface might be Maine in the Prologue to season 13, I had several small heart attacks, and I was very relieved when he wasn't.

So when I saw signs that we were about to get a canon glimpse of Carolina's lost years, I definitely braced myself more than a little.

It didn't precisely line up with my headcanons, no.

And I liked it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it felt perfect.

Having Carolina re-enlist under a new identity was probably at least partly a practical decision, as it provides an in-universe reason for her to still be wearing armor, but in the Halo 2 engine, where the distinctive helmets of the later games don't yet exist. It would've made it easy to choose a setting, since any vaguely-military looking map will do, and can be populated with other generic soldiers. Really, given the medium, the obvious choice would've been either to have Carolina re-enlisted or to have her doing mercenary work, and I think you could easily make either one work. But I think her returning to military service works best, for many reasons.

To re-enlist, Carolina probably had to start from the bottom—no record, no rank. Before Freelancer she could have been an officer for all we know; now she's a rank and file soldier. No status, no elite special ops program, no leaderboard. Just a straightforward military assignment.

Imagine being Carolina, on the run from the disastrous program that was Project Freelancer—a program that was supposed to save humanity, so you gave it, and more importantly your father, the man in charge of it, every benefit of the doubt. Every nonstandard oddity, even things that might have seemed wrong or counterproductive or unfair or unethical, you gritted your teeth and swallowed, and you told yourself it was for the greater good.

After it all came crashing down around you, you created a new identity and re-enlisted. Somewhere quiet, where you could fly under the radar.

And suddenly, you remembered what real military was like.

I'm by no means saying that military culture generally or the UNSC in specific don't have Problems, but getting herself back into a regular outfit might have started to put in perspective just how off the wall Freelancer really was, and that's the kind of revelation that could lead Carolina to put more of the pieces together.

Plus, as a soldier she'd have access to, at the very least, more information channels than the average civilian—she even says she did it in part to have access to military intel, and with her Freelancer experience, she might well have able to get more information through backdoor channels. It makes sense that from that position she might not know everything, like what happened to York, but she might have bits and pieces of information like Wash being with the Recovery force. And at some point, she must have either learned or figured out what the Director was doing with Alpha, because Wash seems to presume she already knows, and she does not correct him.

(She doesn't still have her adaptive camo, though—sorry Jason, that one actually is a continuity error. The Meta took that; we see them use it throughout Reconstruction.)

You've survived things that would've broken me, Wash tells her. And I think that's what's so meaningful about all of this to me: the picture we get of Carolina, in the darkest period of her life, surviving. She's lost everything—her family, her friends, her career. But she keeps moving. Puts herself back in a position where she might be able to do something good for humanity, even if that wasn't her primary motivation at the time. She doesn't become a mercenary, or simply disappear. She stays a soldier, in the only way she can.

I also find something deeply poignant about the fact that Carolina kept her old Freelancer armor in storage. She could have sold it, destroyed it, thrown it out an airlock—but she kept it, hidden away somewhere.

Maybe because she knew, deep down, that one day she would be Agent Carolina again.

No Regular Girls: Why RvB Needs to Stop Punishing Carolina

I just wrote a whole bunch about why I think Carolina and Wash's resolution is great and how it even kind of redeemed that subplot for me in a way I didn't think was possible. I just wrote about how much I love the backfill for Carolina's lost years. And those are certainly not the last positive things I have to say about this season, so I hope that will temper what I'm about to say, because I'm about to get critical—and critical about a character who is very near and dear to my heart.

Season 17 is, on the whole, very sympathetic to Carolina, and I don't want what I'm about to say to diminish that. But this is what we do here at anneapocalypse dot wherever you're reading this—we get into the weeds and deconstruct the framing around characters.

So into the weeds we go. And to contextualize all of this, we need to go back a ways, so strap in.

Carolina's writing has always had it rough. She was introduced during what I would call, within RvB, the Golden Age of Animation and the Dark Age of Storytelling. The Freelancer seasons are jam-packed with action sequences and retcons, and confusingly lacking in exposition and consistent characterization. Part of the reason interpretations of Freelancer characters vary so widely is that big chunks of the story—including, incredibly, who the antagonists actually are—are just missing from these seasons, leaving fans to fill in the blanks in wildly varying ways.

Even Wash's writing suffers during this time period, giving him an extremely passive role in the plot and characterization completely subject to the whims of it. (Ever notice how season 10 Wash mysteriously develops a fear of heights that wasn't there in season 9?) But Carolina in many ways gets the worst of it, thanks to two factors that are in direct conflict with one another:

She's supposed to be the protagonist.

She's the Director's daughter, which isn't supposed to be revealed until the very end, so her point of view has to be extremely limited, leaving her motivations unclear to most viewers for the entire arc.

To make matters worse, because the narrative actively avoids Carolina's point of view for so much of the Freelancer arc, she ends up being repeatedly framed by the way other characters talk about her, rather than by her own motives or even simply her actions. I wrote a whole thing about this with regard to the Sarcophagus mission specifically, in which Carolina is framed as being in the wrong for the way she completes the mission—despite the fact that, in context, all of her actions pretty much square up. And unless you're a nerd like me, obsessed with cutting through the framing to get at the raw text—it's the framing that sticks. She really wants to win. Who cares who gets it first? I guess the leaderboard beckons.

All the words of other characters, which most of the audience will nonetheless take at face value.

But there's more to this than just Carolina. It began with Tex, and it becomes very pronounced in the Freelancer seasons: this pattern of creating strong, assertive, even aggressive female characters and then finding some way to justify why they're going to be punished for being strong.

You know that John Berger quote about vanity? @tuckerfuckingdidit reminded me of it in this context, and I was struck by its appropriateness:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

You wrote a female character who was an asskicking badass because you thought it was hot. You put other characters around her and made them call her "mean," thus morally condemning the woman whose badassery you had depicted for your own pleasure.

So Tex has always been a rotten bitch. (Was she, though?) South was a backstabber who rarely worked in a direct fashion. (Didn't she, though?) CT betrayed her team for some Innie dick because she was bitter about her ranking. (Or did she?) And one by one, they die. Tex even gets to die twice.

Carolina only cared about winning, and now she's screaming on the training room floor. Carolina didn't listen to York, whom she should have just known was right whether he explained what he was doing or not. Carolina just had to fight Tex, Carolina wouldn't give up her AI, and now she's getting thrown off a cliff. She made her bed; now let her lie in it.

See, she was too strong, too competent, too driven, too dedicated to her work. She cared too much. Please pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, or the man sitting at number three on the leaderboard but it's fine because he definitely doesn't care as much and that's what matters. Carolina cared too much, she was too good, and that was wrong, always wrong, definitely wrong, and also she was a bitch.

Because Burnie said she was ambitious! And Burnie is an honorable man.

But hey, fans will sympathize with her now, right—now that we know the true nature of her relationship to the Director? Isn't she more likable now that she's been taken down a few pegs, now that she's sorry she didn't listen to York about all the things he never actually told her? Isn't it good how she feels bad for not throwing away her career to run away with him and have babies?

The thing is, for the fans who were already determined to hate her, none of that made her any more likable. And for the fans who liked her, even related to her arc, the framing of her as always wrong about everything was kind of a constant slap in the face.

Following season 10, Carolina disappeared, and it was unclear at the time if she would ever be returning, until the teaser at the end of season 11. She showed up halfway through season 12 to rescue the Reds and Blues and get stabbed in the leg, and from there she settled into a pretty passive role for the remainder of the season, mostly carting Epsilon around and standing there silent while he was mean to his friends.

At that point, I kinda figured, well, okay, this is how it's gonna be.

It wasn't as though Chorus hadn't also given us some great new developments with regard to female characters. We got Katie Jensen and Emily Grey, both female comedic characters, something the show had been pointedly lacking since Kaikaina was last seen in season 6. And we got Vanessa Kimball, a war-weary rebel leader who broke the mold in a variety of ways: she was a serious, grounded character, but not a hypercompetent hardass (even if some fans seem determined to portray her that way… ahem)—just a kind, principled woman doing her best in dire circumstances. As for Carolina, I figured, at least she's still here, so… yeah, I'll take what I can get.

Then season 13 happened.

And it turned out Miles Luna had been listening to the Carolina fans' disappointment with her role in season 12.

So he not only raised the stakes and beefed up the antagonists—he gave Carolina a subplot. A mini-arc with an old antagonist from the Freelancer days, who forces Carolina to confront not only her guilt about Project Freelancer, but also her sheer terror of losing her team all over again. As @epsilontucker so aptly put it once, "He tells Carolina the things she tells herself. I killed my team. I'll burn for what I did." Sharkface serves as a foil through which Carolina confronts her own past:

I'm sorry. You were on one side of the fight and we were on the other. We thought we were the good guys. I'm sorry.

Please note here that Carolina both takes responsibility for what she was a part of in Freelancer and expresses genuine remorse, while still acknowledging what was beyond her knowledge and control.

I'm not saying season 13 was flawless and beyond criticism. I actually think Carolina's mini-arc might have been even more meaningful if Sharkface had lived, and I think given his justified grievances he was much better set up for a redemption arc than Locus was. Carolina's subplot still serves to continue her isolation from the Reds and Blues, and when she calls them her "family" it's kind of a case of telling and not showing. Nevertheless, what is there works, and it gives Carolina's main arc a kind of resolution that season 10 did not. Miles cared about understanding Carolina and giving her real character development, and that shows.

Season 13 meant a lot to me. It still does.

Unfortunately, season 13 wasn't a turning point. It was an outlier.

Temple was a good idea. While the role of our Reds and Blues in Project Freelancer had been addressed in the past, even giving Sarge a huge existential crisis and some really neat character growth in season 8, the perspective of other sim troopers was a fresh addition to the story. The prototype concept is kind of a mess, and in my opinion makes the rest of the Blues and Reds really boring, but Temple himself and his grievance against the Freelancers, I think really works.

The fumble, in my opinion, was making Carolina the one involved in Biff's death.

Because we already had that story with Sharkface. (And while some have suggested it could be Wash, I don't think that'd be ideal either, because we already had one unresolved "Wash shot a sim trooper" situation going.)

And yes, there are differences between the two stories. But doing another "Carolina's past comes back to haunt her" storyline so soon after Sharkface was a mistake. That proximity to season 13, plus the over-the-top callousness with which Carolina is portrayed in the flashback, is actually a distraction from the larger question of how Project Freelancer treated sim troopers generally—and there are a variety of hints throughout the years that sim trooper deaths were horrifyingly common and accepted, from FILSS's "Oh, that would be wonderful! What a successful test," in season 8, to the Fan Guide anecdote about Agent Alabama at Rat's Nest. Like, this was a thing that happened. A lot. And some incidents were probably a lot less accidental than what happened at Desert Gulch.

But it comes back to that framing thing again. You make it Carolina, and what the audience takes from it is not a statement about the many war crimes of Leonard Church, but a statement about how Carolina, specifically, is mean. And in this case, she doesn't get any character growth from it. She doesn't even get to hear why Temple hates her.

She just gets tortured.

Joe does have that problem where he likes references… a little too much. To the point of cannibalizing past beats from the very show he's writing, without an understanding of what made them good in the first place.

Because the fans liked it when Carolina felt bad about something in season 13, so they'll like her feeling bad again! Don't worry, we'll make sure to keep reminding you, season after season, how sorry she is. Maybe we'll even invent some new past sins for her, and punish her with some literal torture, to make sure she feels extra bad. Has she done anything wrong recently, that she can feel bad about? Make sure she does something new wrong, so she can be sad about it.

Season 16 was a rough time, man.

And then 17 arrived, and began to set things right.

As I said in the two previous sections, the Carolina and Wash portions of season 17 do Carolina very, very right. The backfill for her lost years works incredibly well.

Then we come to the Labyrinth… where Carolina is literally beating herself up.

Oh no.

The House of Mirrors

So, the premise of the Labyrinth is that it works as kind of a house of mirrors, reflecting the worst of its victim's emotions—fears, desires, insecurities, basically whatever will do the most damage—back at them in increasingly distorted ways until it drives them to suicide.

The first thing you might notice about this is that we're kind of back to torture again—it's just psychological torture instead of physical. And the second thing is that this is pretty much the same type of plot device as the True Warrior test in season 13. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of thing in general, but there is one notable exception between the two:

The True Warrior test simply showed the characters something they were afraid of. It showed them something true about themselves, and for Carolina and Locus in particularly this serves as a vehicle for character development.

The Labyrinth, by contrast, takes something true and twists it.

And I do want to point out that even so, every other vision we see in the Labyrinth is framed as being based on something real, amplified though it may be. Kaikaina's guilt over the fire in her childhood home, based on her conversation with her brother, appears to be both a real event and a real feeling she had. Grif's Coach Prestwood seems to be based on a real person in his life, and the emotions he evokes are certainly meant to be real. Tucker's fear of failure rings true, as does Wash's fear of losing his friends. Even Sarge's conflicting desires for both victory and ongoing conflict seems to come from a real place. All of that is the context from which we must approach Carolina's experience in the Labyrinth.

I've noticed it's only with Carolina that active distortion is needed as an explanation for what she experiences. Apparently it's only Carolina who has a self-image so distorted that the past self she confronts in no way resembles who she actually was.

Because no, it doesn't.

Let's unpack the way this scene characterizes Freelancer-era Carolina.

“I feel so much rage when I look at you,” Carolina says to her past self. “You know that? You prioritize yourself over everything. You’re going to get people killed. Heck, you’re going to kill people. And they won’t always deserve it. Dad won’t love you more if you keep winning. He can’t. He died when Mom died. And you’ll bury him. Your competitive streak stops. I’m demanding it.”

“Oh,” says past Carolina, “you’re done? Okay. You got pretty talkative! No need for the lecture. I can read your whole shitty life from your whiny tone of voice.”

“Oh, you think you’re so—”

“Directionless? Scared? No. No, actually I—” Past Carolina laughs viciously. “I feel great. Weird to hear all that from you, though. Let me unpack this. You’ve now tasted defeat, I’m assuming, and you were—aw, sad? For a while?” Her tone grows taunting. “And you want people around as crutches in case you trip again. When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need? A friend in a high place. A bolt hole. A wing man. To forget how to utilize people is to forget yourself. Forget me. And frankly, that’d be damning enough, but you went further. Carolina, you stripped away what comes without thought. What’s instinctual. Your passion. What greater betrayal is there? You’re not you anymore.”

Hoo boy. Okay. Let's try and unpack this.

It’s worth noting that it’s present Carolina who immediately goes on the offensive here, spitting venom at the image of her past self before that image has even spoken. And the things she says… “You’re going to get people killed. You’re going to kill people.”

So what is she talking about? Who did Carolina get killed by being competitive? Who did she kill?

If she’s talking about enemy targets that weren’t who she believed they were… I mean, yeah, they didn’t deserve it, but Carolina was acting as a soldier under orders and her being less competitive wouldn’t make those any less her orders.

Is she talking about the other Freelancers? Because… Carolina didn’t get them killed. North, South, York, Wyoming, Florida—none of them were killed by or because of Carolina’s competitiveness. The only one you could really ascribe to her actions is Maine, and there is a case to be made that Carolina gave up Sigma as much to prove she didn’t need an AI as to help Maine after his injury—but that act was based on such incomplete knowledge that to call it a direct result of Carolina’s competitiveness is a stretch. Furthermore, this argument always seems to ignore the fact that if Maine hadn’t gotten Sigma, someone else would have, and while we don’t know how Sigma might have behaved with a different host, it’s hard to imagine it ending well regardless.

Are we talking about Biff? Because… we’ve been over this, but Carolina didn’t kill Biff, and Biff also didn’t die because Carolina was competitive. Biff’s death was an accident; even Tex, who threw the flagpole Carolina deflected, wasn’t intentionally aiming at Biff, though it does seem like she (or someone else inside that helmet, more likely) must have realized she was throwing it with lethal force. Had Carolina been less determined to win that particular match, there’s no reason to assume Tex (or Omega) would’ve dialed back the aggression. And as we've covered already, sim trooper deaths were far from uncommon in Project Freelancer, and something not one of the agents, not even Good Guy Do the Right Thing York, are ever shown objecting to.

Let’s look at what "past" Carolina says about herself. 

“When have I ever—think about it!—ever allied with someone I didn’t need?”

CT.

CT.

You know, that person everyone forgets about when they’re trying to make a case for Carolina being purely self-serving.

I wrote about this one a long time, ago, but for a refresher: the first time we ever see Carolina question the Director’s orders is when he says that CT is an “acceptable loss.” Carolina embarks on that mission with full intent to disregard that order and try to bring CT in alive, despite that fact that doing so will be far more difficult and offers her no personal gain whatsoever and in fact results in her failing the mission. And while Carolina’s motives in the briefing with the Director may be subtle, her intent on the mission itself is not. The first thing she does upon catching up to Tex is to remind her that they only need the armor. And when she tries to pull Tex back from the killing blow, she explicitly, verbally, objects to Tex killing CT, and even knowing that they have failed the mission and that she will take the blame, Carolina still chastises Tex for what she’s done. This is not just subtext. This is text.

And this is not the only instance of Carolina caring about her teammates. Look at the haste with which she calls for medics when York is injured in training (York who is, by the way, only one spot below her on the board and arguably her closest competition before Tex). There's the offer on the Sarcophagus mission to come to Team B’s aid instead of going after their objective, the “No!” she screams out when Maine gets shot.

None of these are the behaviors of a person who is only out for herself at everyone else’s expense.

Freelancer Carolina is not a ruthless lone wolf who disregards her teammates except when they can benefit her.

This ain't it.

Even if we hadn't already beaten the horse to death with regard to Carolina's Past, this image of her past self is so hideously warped that it's not a meaningful confrontation of that past.

And even if we assume that Carolina is the outlier and accept the "it's bad on purpose" explanation—what does this mean? What truth about Carolina is this based on? Is it just her self-hatred? Because Carolina might have had this kind of warped self-image back in Freelancer—in fact she probably did—but now? We've already seen, multiple times, that she can separate what she was responsible for from what she had no control over. We saw it with Sharkface. We saw it all the way back in season 10, when even in the midst of her profound regret over what happened to Maine and York and the rest of her team, she was still able to see who was truly responsible: the Director.

Is it the fear that she's lost some essential part of herself? Because that hasn't come up even once in this trilogy.

You know what the Labyrinth could have addressed, something that would be relevant to Carolina's arc in this trilogy and to the plot as a whole, and dovetail nicely with the really excellent character growth she gets elsewhere in this season? The fear of opening up and talking through difficult emotions that led to her unintentionally hurting Wash and temporarily drove a rift between them. That's something that would relate deeply to Carolina's recent struggles, and with her friends coming to her aid and her allowing herself to be vulnerable in front of them, it could symbolize her overcoming those struggles.

Instead, we got to see Carolina once again being punished for Freelancer.

This ain't it.

The Freelancer Problem

And if it hadn't been for the Labyrinth—honestly, I probably wouldn't have squinted too hard at the Freelancer-era bits of time travel. The way Carolina repeatedly blows off Wash might have felt a little on the nose, sure, but you know, I could accept the point it was trying to make and the purpose it served for Wash and Donut, and that it was ultimately being played for comedy, and also playing much more off the tone of "The Triplets" from season 14 rather than the tone of seasons 9 and 10. I think that latter point is important, because that's part of what makes this bit feel just a little bit off, even when you can't put your finger on why.

But the Labyrinth happened, and it left a really bad taste in my mouth, such that it was difficult to even rewatch season 17 for a while despite how much of it I liked, and when I did finally rewatch it, well. It case those scenes in a bit of a new light. So squint I shall.

So, okay, back in Freelancer, maybe Carolina liked and trusted her team, but she wasn't close to them as friends, though. She didn't socialize with them outside of missions and training, and she didn't see any reason to speak to them outside of a mission context. That tracks, right?

Does it, though? Does it really?

I don't want to dwell too much on Carolina and York, because the canon itself has always been kind of confused about what the nature of their relationship actual was, which I have discussed at length, repeatedly. But it is at least implied that York and Carolina had some kind of social relationship, and that alone means Carolina wasn't opposed to that kind of relationship with her teammates on principle.

But maybe she was only friendly with York? But—no, Carolina engages in friendly banter during missions with other teammates as well. Her chatter with Niner is consistently friendly, something that carries even into the season 15 flashback. And in season 10 we even see Carolina teasing Wash himself.

Maybe Carolina preferred only to socialize with agents of a certain status. Their elite pilot, York, maybe a few other high-ranking agents. But no, back in season 15 we were told that Carolina used to go out drinking with York and his buddies who included lower-ranking agents, people who weren't even on the leaderboard and certainly lower-ranked than Wash.

But okay, maybe it's just Wash Carolina didn't like. Maybe that teasing isn't so friendly. Maybe Freelancer was just like high school, and Carolina was the Mean Girl snubbing the guy most recently moved up to her squad.

Back up the fun bus.

If anyone treated Wash like shit in Freelancer—particularly in season 10—it was York, and to a lesser extent North. York picks on Wash constantly throughout season 10, and initially Wash mostly seems to snark back, but by late in the season York's comments are making Wash visibly deflate.

York who is here calling Wash "buddy." And this scene is in the season 10 era. It has to be because Maine has the Brute shot. The series of jump-cuts that follow kind of imply that Wash jumps around to different points in Freelancer, but this point, where York, Wyoming, and Maine walk by and Wash stops York to talk to him, is unmistakably season 10.

Squint.

North also picks on Wash in this scene, and that much tracks, though it is interesting that he gangs up with South, not with York, making this probably the most unity the twins have during this time period.

But the other characters' appearances are brief and therefore of less consequence. It's Carolina who ramifies here because it is Carolina who is a part of this story, and whose Freelancer-era characterization is an issue elsewhere. And in that light, her dismissals of Wash feel more suspect. It sounds as though Jen's been directed to sound, not exhausted and frustrated as she actually would have been during season 10, but smug and snobbish. Like she thinks she's too good for Wash. Because, you know, high school.

I point back the fact that as recently as season 15, we had a photo of Carolina while in Freelancer, gone out drinking with lower-ranking agents, but in 17 I'm supposed to believe she wouldn't even talk to a member of her own team. I realize we're talking about different writers here, and I actually found that photo a little weird myself, for other reasons which I covered in the season 15 essay. In the context of the Time Travel Trilogy as a whole, though, all this just adds a certain incoherence to Carolina's characterization—like with Tucker in season 16, it feels like trying to have it all ways. Carolina was social with other Freelancers when it's convenient for the plot and exposition we need to set up, but when it makes for angst material, well, she was a total standoffish bitch actually. This is less the fault of either writer individually, and more a fault in the trilogy itself and its lack of focus, generally and specific to Carolina.

But I bring this up to point out that you don't even have to go all the way back to season 10 to see examples of Carolina's relationship to her team that do not square up with her being a snob who wouldn't even speak to a team member outside of a mission context.

Though if you're going to comment so heavily on seasons 9 and 10… giving her characterization in those seasons a closer look definitely would not be amiss.

Here's something else Carolina said in season 10, something I would expect Miles (who wrote episode 5) in particular to remember:

It's because I had a team once. A team with the best training, the best equipment—and despite everything that they had that made them the best, they still lied, and stole, and tore each other to pieces. So you tell me--how the hell am I supposed to trust a ragtag team of idiots, when I couldn't even trust the people who were closest to me?

The people who were closest to me. Those were the Freelancers. That was Carolina's team. That's canon, baby. No, Carolina definitely didn't make it easy to get close to her but she did trust her team at one point and she did care about them and this is a hill I will die on. That's why it hurt her so much when it all fell apart: Freelancer, the Director, broke her trust in other people. That's why it takes her so long to trust anyone again.

There's a lot of great Carolina in this season, but the Freelancer-related stuff misses the mark on a lot of levels.

What Did You Just Call Me?

So, let's talk about Real Names.

A lot of us have enjoyed the Four Seven Niner cameos in recent seasons, myself included because she's a great character and we miss her. I am however going to use her to point out the pattern in this arc of using Real Names where there is no in-universe reason to do so.

Way back in season 6, we learn that Wash's first name is David when the Director addresses him as such over a speaker during the break-in at Command. The Director adds, "May I call you David?" to which Wash replies tersely, "No, you cannot. You gave me my new name; the least you can do is use it." Fine. Good. This works both in-universe and in what it telegraphs to the audience. Of course the Director knows Wash's real name, but the critical thing is that he's trying to use it to presume familiarity, to disarm Wash and to assert power over him. Wash sees this for exactly what it is and responds in kind. The Director may know a lot about Wash, but that does not mean he gets to act like they're friends. Please note that this scene tells us nothing about how Wash feels about his real name generally. It tells us about his relationship with the Director and that is the point. This is good use of a real name and good storytelling.

Wash's real name is not used at all during the Freelancer seasons, nor during the Chorus Trilogy (with I think the exception of Locus's stalker diary, but that's bonus content, and it's information it makes sense for Locus to have). Fast-forward to season 14, "The Triplets," and we see Wash called David for the first time since season 6—this time by Agent Ohio, in a glimpse of Project Freelancer pre-season 9. This time, Wash responds with, "Just... don't call me "David", okay? This unit takes that kind of stuff pretty seriously." Here, again, through the use of the name we learn some things. Wash was at one point familiar enough with Ohio, Idaho, and Iowa for them to know his first name. It's possible the lower-ranking agents are less careful about these things, but it's also implied that Wash and the Triplets were friends before he moved up the ranks.

In the following episode, "The Mission," we learn the real names of the Triplets: Ohio is Vera, Idaho is Ezra, and Iowa is Mike. It's clear Shannon wanted to establish real names for them in the limited time we would have would them, but their use is still justified by its context: Idaho's feelings have been hurt, and he uses first names to shift to a more familiar tone with Ohio and talk things out. He also asks her if it's okay to call her Vera, and I like this because it noticeably mirrors the Director's question to Wash in season 6, while conveying something completely different about the characters. Where the Director sought to presume familiarity as a means of controlling Wash, Ezra offers familiarity as a way of reaching out to his friend.

Fast forward to season 15 and Wash and Carolina on the beach. We're going to set aside everything else that's weird about this conversation, and just focus on Carolina's "Do you really believe that, David?"

It is not impossible that Carolina knows Wash's first name. I mean, it's a little weird, because season 14 explicitly made the point that the higher-ranking Freelancers are much more diligent about sticking to codenames, and it's pretty clear in season 10 that Carolina didn't have access to the detailed information about the inner workings of the program. But since Wash's name was floating around the lower squads, maybe she heard it at some point. Maybe she was able to dig up records while on the run. Maybe Wash simply told her his real name offscreen at some point between season 10 and now. Like I said, it's not impossible. Moreover, she uses it in an appropriate context. This is an intimate, emotional conversation between two close friends, and Carolina signals that by using Wash's rarely-used real name. Fine. I accept that.

Also in season 15: Kaikaina Grif's real name is used onscreen for the first time in the show's history. This is not only appropriate but long overdue, and coming from Dylan Andrews, a reporter, it makes perfect sense. Great name drop. Feels good. Feels organic. Thank you. (That said, it is a little weird, come season 16, when Tucker waffles back and forth between calling her "K" and calling her "Sister"… almost as if perhaps a lead writer and a co-writer never got on the same page about that.)

Then, at the climax of season 16: Carolina says, "David's hurt. We have to go."

So, the appropriate response from pretty much everyone else onscreen was, "Who?"

There is no reason to assume the Reds and Blues know Wash's real name. He has been "Wash" the entire time they've known him. The one exception might be Simmons, who actually read the personnel files they found at the Offsite Storage Facility. But none of these people think of Wash as "David." Again, is it impossible? No, of course not, because you can always make up something happening offscreen to explain it. But based on what we've actually seen, it is not well set up that most of the Reds and Blues would even know the name, nor is there any reason for Carolina to think they would. Even Carolina herself has only used the name once, and in a very private context. So this just doesn't track. It's supposed to make us feel something, but the logic doesn't connect, and for me, it ends up being distracting more than anything else.

Part of the reason I think this feels so weird with regard to Wash, specifically, is that we just don't know the real names of many of the Freelancers, period. And that's kind of fine? Because in most cases we do not need to know. Yeah, it is sort of implied in Out of Mind that the Freelancers knew each other's real names, but so much of the early miniseries canon has been retconned away that I don't consider that particularly relevant now. We don't know York's real name. We don't know North's, or South's, or CT's. And we don't know Carolina's.

But we do know Wash's, and he's still alive, and the fans like it when we do name drops, so… okay.

Smash cut to season 17: Donut is looking for Wash after a time jump and calls out, "Wash! Agent Washington? Yoohoo! Uh... David?"

So, if there is one character who has no reason to know Wash's real name at this point in time, it's Donut. He wasn't at the Offsite Storage Facility in season 8. He and Wash don't have any kind of a relationship that might've led Wash to share that information offscreen, as Wash might have with Tucker or Caboose. And he wasn't there when Carolina used Wash's real name in season 16! He'd already left with the Hammer! Donut should not know Wash's real name, even if him using it in this context would tell us something significant about the characters and their relationship. And it doesn't, because at this point in the season they don't have a relationship.

And then there's "Ash."

When Wash travels back to his Recovery One self, he hears Command, aka Four Seven Niner over the radio, and exclaims "Ash, is that really you?" And thus, the Pilot Without a Name now has a name.

Now, Niner's little slip where she blurts out, "I thought maybe we'd lost you, too"? That is the kind of emotionally intelligent backfill I am here for. The Freelancer seasons gave us our beloved unnamed pilot with the same voice as Wash's Command, the unbeatable Lee Eddy, and whether they were always meant to be the same character or "I'd hate to have that guy's job" was just meant to be kind of a meta joke I was never sure. But they certainly became the same character, whether it was originally planned or not.

And that idea of the team's old pilot now stuck jockeying a radio, having to give Wash the order to kill South—I think that's always quietly haunted a lot of us, myself included. "Recovery One, please confirm, you are now Level 0." What was she feeling? Did she regret having to do it? Was she detached from it? Tapping into that question, that feeling, with just one little line—in an episode all about Wash facing a particularly shitty part of his past, that is the line that really gets me. That makes me feel something.

"Ash," on the other hand…

So, why would Wash call her by her first name?

I will definitely grant you that the absence of any kind of official designation for the Freelancers' pilot, such that the fans had to take to calling her by the name of her dropship was a hole in the canon. (It's not even a callsign, it's a vehicle designation—as in "This is Vehicle four-seven-niner, go for secure.") It would've been nice back in season 9 to get a real name of "Flight Officer So-and-So," or even some kind of codename for her as Project Freelancer seems to have been pretty big on codenames!

Which brings me to: If the Project was so strict about codenames for the upper ranks, why would Wash even know the first name of his elite squad's star pilot? And even if he did know it, why would he blurt it out on instinct like he's used to calling her that, when he never did in Freelancer—and when, judging by the Freelancer seasons, it doesn't even look like they were that close? And this is not like Carolina calling Wash "David," where they've spent time together post-Freelancer and grown closer. Wash hasn't seen or heard from Niner in years.

As always you can make up offscreen explanations for it if you want, but this doesn't tell us anything new about Wash's relationship with Niner so much as it just confuses the relationship they already had. I think the best way this works for me is if Ash is actually her last name, or a nickname of her last name. It's at least less weird that way.

And this isn't me pointing out plotholes just to nitpick. My problem with the name drops is that they've begun to feel fanservicey in the bad way: gratuitous, distracting, lacking in meaningful context. It's clear that hearing "David" or "Ash" is supposed to make us Feel Something, but each out-of-context overuse of Real Names dilutes that—until it makes us feel nothing at all.

You Need to Let Go

In the same way that RvB needs to stop beating the dead horse of Carolina's past, it needs to stop beating the dead horse of Freelancer generally.

Freelancer was the heart of Red vs. Blue for ten years, as the shadowy backstory to Blood Gulch that reared its head in Recollections and found resolution at the end of season 10. And while certain artifacts of Project Freelancer found their way into the Chorus storyline, Chorus was not about Freelancer. It was an effective step in moving on from the Project, moving the story and the characters in new directions. At points both Wash and Carolina grappled with their pasts, and from that they moved forward.

Season 15… landed us right back in Project Freelancer. And as I said before, I do like Temple and his story and I do think it was a fresh take, but it shouldn't have centered Carolina and that aspect of it did feel very derivative. Now, two seasons later, we've had a storyline that has nothing to do with Project Freelancer—but we're still reaching back there, revisiting it, revising it, adding to it, angsting over it. This is a problem for character reasons I've already covered, but I think it's also a symptom of the show as a whole feeling a little bit… stuck in a loop, shall we say.

I'm not going to say that Wash and Donut, for example, shouldn't have revisited their history, as that was resolution that was long overdue, and also relevant to the plot. And I'm not opposed to character moments that touch on the past in such a way, like, say, Wash and Carolina finally having a conversation about Epsilon. I'm certainly not saying that the ways in which characters were affected and grew from those experience should be forgotten—quite the opposite in fact.

But the revisiting Freelancer over and over, mining it for angst, especially when it's not plot-relevant—

It's dead, Jim.

It's over. We need to let go. These characters need to stop reliving their past, and the show needs to stop returning to plot threads and character beats that are already resolved.

It's time to move on, for the characters and for the story as a whole.

I hope season 17 can serve as kind of the final bookend on Freelancer, and let the show move on to new stories.

Reframing Tucker

Season 16 hit Tucker's characterization the hardest. Wash and Carolina's conflict may have been my personal least favorite, but Tucker's writing certainly takes the cake for the most actively mean-spirited, something I discussed at length in last year's essay.

I'll admit I wasn't feeling super optimistic about Tucker's writing for this season after watching the first episode, which seemed to be playing off the same kind of "Tucker is arrogant and stupid" hot take as last season, but as it came from the mouth of our villain, I can kinda take that with a grain of salt.

And beyond that, Tucker's role in season 17 is brief, but strong. I think brief is fine, as Tucker is not the protagonist of this arc, and season 16 did itself no favors spending so much time magnifying his flaws at the expense of screentime for its own protagonist. Tucker needed one thing from this season: resolution.

But it's a bit more complicated with Tucker, as it's not merely an in-universe resolution he needed. The nature of Tucker's maliciously over-the-top characterization in season 16, abandoning all of his Chorus-era character growth and inventing new flaws he didn't really have before just to take him down a peg, kinda needed a meta-resolution. It's not the kind of thing you can really fix, short of straight up retconning the previous season—which, hilariously, season 16 does kind of do via time travel! but the characters still remember it so it's not quite the same as it never happening.

Season 17 doesn't try to pretend that what happened between Tucker and Kaikaina didn't happen. In fact it's referenced directly in "Limbo" when Kaikaina wants to fuck with Tucker, and Doc remarks that they seem to have some unresolved issues. I like this a lot. It's funny, for one thing! And it's good Kaikaina. It's great to see her just being ridiculous in true Sister form—especially since Jensen and Dr. Grey aren't around anymore and we're a little short on comedic female characters again. (And for future seasons—it is 100% okay to let Carolina be funny, for the record. She's done it before!)

But Tucker's moment in this season comes later, once the Reds and Blues have set out to fix the timeline. After all, in a story about time traveling through one's past, what better way to remember Tucker's growth on Chorus than to send him back to Chorus?

So, setting aside the silliness of the plot, Tucker's self-reflection on Chorus also doesn't erase his season 16 actions—but it does kind of reframe them.

This was one of the worst moments of my life. But it reminded me of something. I became a leader on Chorus. And since we left it, I've been trying to act how I thought a leader should: cool, macho, totally self-confident. But somehow I forgot that I wasn't any of those things while I was actually leading. I was scared all the time, constantly second-guessing myself. But when shit got bad, I was the one to step up and make a decision. That's all it is. And right now, Donut's doing a better job of that than anyone. So yeah, I have faith.

Again, it's not that this undoes season 16's meanspirited dragging of Tucker, or makes me like it more. But there's a sincerity here, and a meaningful move to tie in Tucker's recent fumbles to his insecurity, which as I've discussed before, has kind of always been a thing. And on a meta level there's an acknowledgment in this monologue itself of what season 16 missed about Tucker. Not just the growth that was forgotten, but the team dynamic we've been missing—the faith in his friends, which Tucker now expresses toward Donut.

That means a lot. It's a truly good faith effort at making things right for Tucker, and I really like it.

Reintegrating Doc

I talked a bit about Doc last season, in regard to feeling like he'd fallen pretty out of step with the other characters in terms of his characterization and how seriously his feelings are meant to be taken, and how this goes all the way back to season 13. And though he too turns out to be an agent of Chrovos in season 16, it doesn't really end up mattering that much, and even his big fight with Donut ends up being of little consequence.

Doc plays a small role in this season, but I like the role he does play. Even Donut initially talks over Doc in "The Everwhen," and there's a certain irony in that considering that Donut's whole arc here is about being talked over and ignored—but it's also kind of in-character for Donut to be oblivious to the fact that he's even doing that.

So it's pretty satisfying to me, at the end of "Omphalos," when Doc points out that he's being talked over, and Donut… actually listens to him! And teaming up with Doc serves to further the plot. It's pretty great.

And it's equally satisfying when Doc, once in the Labyrinth, gets a moment to grapple with his O'Malley personality and reclaim control of it in order to escape. That really works for me, because I've come to read O'Malley as the part of Doc that emerges when Doc needs someone to stand up for him and in his own personality is incapable of standing up for himself. It certainly follows from season 13, and from season 16. So Doc calling upon O'Malley and consciously reclaiming that part of himself feels like good character development, and it really works here.

It's a nice little piece of resolution for Doc: reintegrating Doc's personalities, and beginning to reintegrate Doc himself as part of the gang and a plot-relevant character.

Stakes That Matter

See, the real stakes in season 17 are relationships.

Some of this carries forward from season 16, most notably for Wash and Carolina. Some of it taps into old unresolved conflicts, like Donut and Wash. And much of it involves rebuilding the team as a whole. Donut must travel through time collecting his friends, and with Wash's help, reunite them to fix the timeline. And at the end, they must find each other in the Labyrinth to overcome their demons and escape.

Season 15 lost track of that team dynamic, and the power the Reds and Blues have always had to triumph when they work together. In its final act, it lost track of the stakes that matter to fans: the characters we care about. Season 16 lost track of character arcs we've been following for many, many years now, and caught up the characters in a conflict that ultimately had little to do with them.

Season 17 has time travel in it, but it's not about time travel. Not really. The time travel serves as a mechanic, not just for plot but for character and relationship growth. What season 17 is about is restoring that neglected found family dynamic, bringing everyone back together to save the day.

Because that's always been a theme of Red vs. Blue: when the bonds are strong enough, the power of friendship wins every time.

Season 17 has the right idea that it's the characters and their relationships that matter, that the characters should drive the plot and therefore the stakes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: No matter how grand the stakes, how wacky the adventures, or how cool the animations, Red vs. Blue is a show that hooked us with a bunch of people standing around talking. It is character-driven first and foremost, and the characters will always be its heart.

Loose Ends

I mentioned earlier that not every character gets a complete resolution in this storyline, and there are some loose ends to be picked up in our next arc, whatever that may be. Grif is definitely the most prominent one. Simmons is another to me—not so much a loose end as just kind lacking a character arc at all. Both could use some attention in seasons to come.

As I discussed earlier, I think Blue Team has had a pretty solid run of protagonists. The one exception I can see might be Kaikaina, but I think she could use some more time hanging with the core cast before she's ready for that role. With the Freelancer storyline well in the past (or at least it should be!) it makes sense to let Red Team have their time. Donut made a decent start to that. He has a good arc here.

So Grif, in my opinion, deserves another shot. He did not have a complete character arc in this storyline, and in hindsight, the Shisno arc really is Donut's story, not Grif's. I think Grif can be a good protagonist and I think he deserves another chance to be one.

Then there's Simmons, who's had a lot less character development than Grif, to the tune of almost none, and could really use some.

I don't think those two things are in conflict at all. Grif and Simmons' relationship has itself seen a long-running arc that many fans love. A storyline focusing on Grif and Simmons as co-protagonists could be really cool, and if this phase of RvB is Red Team's turn to shine, I can think of no better way to do that than to put Grif and Simmons in the spotlight. This leaves open the possibility for some great Grif siblings moments as well.

And of course, if the show were to finally canonize Grif/Simmons of a romantic nature, a lot of us would not be complaining one bit. But even simply focusing on their friendship and letting their partnership drive the story has some great potential.

Just an idea, but one I think could be really cool.

Conclusions

Jason Weight had a basically impossible task here. He had to finish somebody else's story with a lot of balls in the air while also resolving a lot of character threads that, uh, troubled a lot of fans from last season. It's much easier to critically analyze someone else's story than to write your own, never mind to complete someone else's. This was a tough goddamn job. I'm not surprised this season went through three treatments before one stuck.

It’s also really hard to judge a person’s writing when they’re writing under someone else’s direction and not running the show. I'm aware that Jason wrote one of my least favorite episodes of season 16, but he did so under Joe as lead writer, so it’s hard to say just how much creative freedom he had there.

This season, Jason's had a lot more freedom with character writing and I think that’s where this season shines. The plot's a mess, but given that Jason was tasked with completing someone else’s story arc, which was already a mess, I can’t really lay that on him. Moreover, if he changed the rules, and rearranged the universe a little, he did so in such a way as to allow the story to be more character-driven, and that's what we needed.

Season 17 was a fixer-upper, and for the most part it accomplished what it needed to. There's an emotional intelligence to this season overall that I found lacking in previous seasons, and an attention to characters and character arcs that I find heartening. This is no surprise, when you listen to Jason talk about his work in interviews and panels. There's a love for the characters that really shines through.

Gosh darn it, his writing has heart.

And I would really like to see more. Since it seems pretty clear the show will be continuing, I think there's no better candidate to write season 18, and to lead us into whatever new adventures may come.

Jason deserves that shot, if he wants it. And I do hope we'll get a chance to see his work with these characters again, in a story that is his own.

[sanders-specs]

My Ace Story

A few people seemed to be interested in this, so here it is for anyone who wants to read. It’s pretty long, over 2k words. I just had a lot of feelings and thoughts about this whole thing and I had a sudden urge to just write it all down. I don’t know, maybe it’ll help someone, but this really just for me. To get these thoughts out of my head. Again, it’s pretty long, so it’s all under the cut. 

I’ve seen a lot of ace stories since I started looking into asexuality. Since I first thought I myself might be ace. All of those stories seemed to talk about some revelation, some moment where everything seemed to fall into place. I know not everyone’s stories are the same, but I just saw a lot of things that seemed to be common for a lot of ace people. I’ve never really seen one like mine, though, so here it is.

For me being ace was never something that was loud. It was never in my face. I never had a sudden realization or an ‘aha!’ moment. It was all a really slow, really quiet understanding of the way I’ve been feeling for the past ten years of my life (roughly after I started puberty, though I suppose you could argue it goes further back than that).

I was never told I was weird. Or wrong. Or alien. So I never really felt that way. There were a few days, here and there, where I wondered to myself why I didn’t seem to look at other people the way my friends seem to, but I’d always dismiss it and move on with my life.

Here’s the thing, though. Sex has never been an open conversation to me. I learned about sex through fanfiction (really bad fanfiction I might add). My mom never sat me down and told me about it. It’s never been a topic openly discussed in my house. Even now that I’m almost twenty, it’s just not something we really talk about.

I don’t blame my mom. She was never comfortable talking about any ‘privet’ stuff with me. She never talked about that stuff with her own mother. I always had to ask about periods and anything else pertaining my body. She once told me that even though she was uncomfortable, she forced herself to talk about it when I asked questions because she wanted to be there for me.

So no, I can’t blame her. It was just never something I asked about.

I never thought to ask about it. It was never something I was concerned with. Sure, I’d read about it in fanfic or books, or I’d see sex scenes on TV shows or movies. Those would intrigue me, in the way that learning how something works intrigues me. I guess I just thought I’d figure it out when the time came. It never occurred to me to experiment. It was never something I was comfortable with.

My friends never talked about it either. We were a group of loners, a group of nerds of varying degrees. None of us really had partners for a while, until high school at least (with a few exceptions). But we never talked about sex. Not even when people started pairing off. At least, they never talked about sex around me.

Maybe it was the demeanor I had. Maybe it was the shyness or the social anxiety. But I was always the ‘innocent one.’ I was always the “wow she never swears!” “She’s a good girl” person of our group. So they felt like they had to ‘preserve’ my ‘innocence.’

Now, I don’t ever recall anyone saying those things to me in a serious way. Jokes, sure, but I think the jokes got into my head and festered. Most of those things were just my perception. How I felt. But I honestly do think that on some level they were real.

And it got under my skin. It annoyed me that I seemed to me on the outside of some joke everyone seemed to be in on and no one was willing to explain it to me. I was annoyed that I felt like I was being treated like a five year old by my own friends.

That’s probably the most extreme emotion I ever felt about the whole thing. It was less about my own sexuality, though, and more about how I was being treated because of it (even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I still considered myself straight).

I did take a moment to think about why I was so upset. Because, well, they were right. I honestly didn’t know much about sex. Talking about it made me flustered and uncomfortable. So I pretty much resigned myself to my feelings about it all, and internalized it. Not the healthiest thing to do (and I did end up having a breakdown about it, and eventually talking to my friends about it. I am a lot better about it all now).

For the most part, though, it was just little confusions. Not understanding why someone would want to have sex in the bathrooms, why people would make out in the hallways, why my school had a literally stairwell (out of three) that pretty much everyone—student body and staff—knew to avoid in the mornings because that’s where couples went to make out (or do more). I couldn’t for the life of me understand why a group of boys would go to the effort to sneak into the ceiling and cut out a hole in the tiles of the girls bathroom to spy in there (yes, that’s something that actually happened and it amuses, baffles, and angers me to this day).

I just couldn’t wrap my head around it all. Even at a younger age, it baffled me. I remember in fifth grade there was a boy who a girl in my glass always bickered and fought with. They weren’t in the same class, so it was mostly shouting across the lunch tables or playground bickering. Then one day when our two classes got together for a movie day, I saw them holding hands and cuddling and I was just…baffled. Completely and utterly confused. My first thought was honestly “wait, are they allowed to do that?” followed by “wait…what? why?”

Then there was the ever so wonderful sex ed class in eighth grade. Okay, honestly, it was more of a ‘scare these girls into never having sex because dieses’ class. The instructor even went on the assumption that everyone knew what sex was and how it worked, so I spent a majority of the class just vaguely confused and wondering why the hell would anyone ever want to have sex, it sounded terrible.

In high school, every single year at the beginning of the year we all got the same lecture on not sending nudes. It was illegal, could ruin your life, all that jazz. Every time, I would always think “who in their right mind would want to do that?” Partly because I’m very much of a stick to the rules and law kind of girl (mostly) but also because the entire concept confused me. I never understood what the point was. I always thought if you want to send a picture to your partner, just send one of you looking nice. Why do you have to be naked? What is the point?

I guess I also didn’t understand the kind of vulnerability a person would be putting themselves in with that situation. I don’t know. It still confuses me, but I’ve just let it go at this point.

Those are just some of the bigger stuff. There were a lot of smaller things. Conversations I overheard, offhand comments, jokes that went over my head.

Even through all of that, though, I never thought I was weird. I never thought of myself as different. I honestly reasoned it with “well, there are over seven billion people on this earth, so the chances of me being the only person on the world who feels this way is honestly really small” and I would go about my day. Seriously. That’s how I validated myself. I just assumed everyone felt the same way until they proved otherwise.

And like I said before, it wasn’t really my biggest concern. I knew I was attracted to guys in some form or fashion, so I just figured I was straight. I didn’t know asexuality was a thing.

I always thought I felt sexual attraction, though. Everyone felt attracted to someone, right? I just thought “well, yeah, of course I do.” At the time it wasn’t even sexual attraction. It was just…sex.

I never stopped to think about what sexual attraction actually feels like.

I never stopped to realize all my ‘crushes’ were incredibly forced.

I never thought about it. I was far more concerned about school or clubs or literally anything else. No one ever really flirted with me (to my knowledge), sex was never offered to me, I never dated anyone. It was never a direct part of my life. Still isn’t, honestly.

It wasn’t really until I first heard the term asexual that I realized it was even a thing. I can’t even remember when I first heard the term. I remember the time after, and I remember the time before, but I can’t really remember when I first heard the word. I think it was when one of my friends introduced me to someone who was asexual, and they explained, but I can’t be sure.

The knowledge of it did open some doors for me. I didn’t really start researching it until a lot later when I started to seriously question myself, but the thought was always there in the back of my mind.

The thought “well at least I know I’m not asexual” flitted through my had far too many times throughout that year (I do remember that it was specifically my senior year of high school). I call that denial. Because it was. I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t ace.

I should also mention that this was around the time when nearly all of my friends had come out. I was surrounded by LGBT+ people all the time (all of whom I love dearly), so it was something that was on my mind a lot. I was convinced that me wondering if asexuality fit me was just me trying to fit in with them. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d done something to try and fit in with my friends. If I’m being honest, there’s still a part of me that kinda thinks that. That I just didn’t want to be the “token straight friend” (which I had been referred to multiple times, mostly as a joke I think, but something about it always bothered me a little) anymore. I was honestly really afraid of what they would say, so I never said anything to them about it for a long time.

There was this one time in my psychology class, though, that really started to make me realize I might be ace. We were going to have a whole class period talking about asexuality and whether or not it’s a thing. I was so excited for it. I was prepared to defend asexuality to the death. Then I ended up missing it because I had to make up a stupid quiz. I even tried to convince my teacher to let me take it later because I really wanted to be in that discussion, but because it “wasn’t going to be on the AP test” it didn’t matter.

I’m still bitter about it.

Mostly because when he told us we were going to talk about it, my first thought was “maybe this will help me determine if I’m asexual or not.”

It wasn’t really a thought that I acknowledged, apart from my disappointment of missing the whole thing. It was a thought that scared me, though, because it was serious. It was really the first time I started thinking that maybe I’m not straight, and it frightened me a little. So much so that I pushed it to the back of my mind after that day and didn’t think too much about it after that.

At least until after I graduated and started spending all day everyday at home with way too much time to think.

I remember that first new years after I graduated was the first time I ever even spoke the word asexuality out loud to another person.

I was talking with my friend Star, and we were talking about sex in some form or fashion, I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember they were the first person I ever talked about possibly being ace with. This was at a time where I was still in denial, still questioning, but talking with them even a little helped.

This was after months of researching, of reading blog posts about being ace, what it means. This was after I found the Thomas Sanders community that is full of ace and ace accepting people. Where asexuality is talked about in a positive and opening light. Thomas himself has ace friends who I greatly admire and look up to. It’s something I’ll forever be grateful for. Because of them, I started to feel more comfortable about the idea. Because of them, I learned and finally understood what asexuality even means beyond its textbook definition.

Because of them, I felt comfortable about talking about it with one of my closest friends.

There’s a lot I have to be grateful to that community for.

Really, it was after talking with Star that I really threw myself into it. More research, more speculation, more paying attention to my own feelings. I wasn’t scared about the idea anymore. Well, I was, but I felt like I needed to get through that. I needed to understand.

They’re still the person I feel the most comfortable talking about it with. They were there through all my rants, through my slow but sure acceptance of myself. I can’t count the number of times I messaged them just ranting about different ace things and my wonderings. I’m beyond glad I have someone like them in my life. Someone who didn’t even understand asexuality fully at the time but was completely accepting and supportive and eventually asked questions to better understand me and asexuality as a whole.

So now I’m on the other side of it. Like I said, there was no sudden realization. It was literal years of just slow understanding, working through a lot of confusions and frustrations. I see a lot of ace stories where people were treated horribly in relationships, where they spent their lives wondering what was wrong with them.

Those stories are valid, and by no means can mine compare to theirs, but I don’t see a lot of stories like mine. Where figuring out you’re ace wasn’t a big thing. It didn’t feel like a big thing. It was just a part of me, a part of my personality, of my feelings, that finally had a title. That I finally understood.

There are still some downsides, though.

I know I can never tell my parents. I just don’t believe they’ll understand it at all, or worse, tell me I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just my fear, but it’s not something I want to test.

Telling the rest of my friends was absolutely terrifying, and I’m honestly scared if/when I get a romantic partner.

There are a lot of people who don’t think ace people exist, that it’s a thing, and it’s sad and frustrating and upsetting.

I feel like I can never be out IRL because of the fear of those people.

Still, there is a kind of peace of mind that came with it. Probably because I was right in my initial rationalization. There are other people who feel the same way I do. I just didn’t know we a had a name.

[allatariel]

Beth and Saint Catherine of Alexandria

I wrote this nearly three years ago and it has been languishing in my google docs waiting to be made tumblr-ready ever since. I have not updated the content appreciably, so it may very well contain outdated theories or speculations long since proven false or at the very least ill-timed, but it feels like unfinished business. I'd rather realease it into the wild than delete all this work. To my knowledge, no one else has yet touched on at least the visual connections herein, but I have been out of touch with TWD and the fandom for a few years now, for various reasons. Thank you for your indulgence.

Apologies if I'm rehashing old information; I looked and couldn't find anything like this, but maybe I ain't looking right.

Special thanks to @bethgreenewarriorprincess and @bethgreeneishopeunseen for listening to me ramble about this and all your help!

The image below of Beth waking up in the hospital never appeared in the show, but has been used often promotionally (here, here, and here for a start), even years later (on August 7, 2016) with the tweet of the Beth's Journey video originally posted to YouTube on November 30, 2014 after 5x08 Coda aired.

She looks altogether more beatific than Rick did in roughly the same situation. See how the light, almost heavenly in nature, illuminates her clean face, smooth brow, and shiny hair and reflects in her eyes, giving them a diffused look, as though she’s looking at something no one else can see, like an apparition. Contrast this with Rick bathed in wan light, sweaty and unkempt, his brow furrowed in confusion and dawning alarm, as he takes in the evidence of neglect in the room around him that is plain for us to see in the ensuing shots.

I knew I'd seen this image somewhere before, and I know it's a very typical depiction of beatific passion, many examples of which can be found in religious art and throughout art history (e.g., here, here, here, and here). But it specifically looks, to me, most like Raphael's Saint Catherine of Alexandria. (for an additional analysis of Beth's saintly framing supported by connections to another saint, St. Mary Frances, see here)

This is a cropped screenshot of the full image found on Wikipedia. Note that another depiction by Caravaggio, whose The Denial of Saint Peter figures very prominently in 5x04 Slabtown (for an analysis of the use of this painting in 5x04, see here), is linked from that page and vice versa, but not any other artist's versions, of which there are many (see here, here, and here for a few). (It is also interesting to note that Caravaggio's The Denial of Saint Peter is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and though it has toured, it has never been exhibited at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. The High does have another painting titled The Denial of St. Peter in its collection, which was painted some twenty years later by Nicolas Tournier who was influenced by Caravaggio's work.)

Saint Catherine of Alexandria is a bit of a mythic figure; the following summary of her life is quoted from the Wikipedia page for her, with citations included linked within.

Legend

According to the traditional narrative, Catherine was the daughter of Constus, the governor of Alexandrian Egypt during the reign of the emperor Maximian (286–305).[6] From a young age she had devoted herself to study. A vision of the Madonna and Child persuaded her to become a Christian. When the persecutions began under Maxentius, she went to the emperor and rebuked him for his cruelty. The emperor summoned fifty of the best pagan philosophers and orators to dispute with her, hoping that they would refute her pro-Christian arguments, but Catherine won the debate. Several of her adversaries, conquered by her eloquence, declared themselves Christians and were at once put to death.[7]

Torture and martyrdom Catherine was then scourged and imprisoned, during which time over 200 people came to see her, including Maxentius' wife, Valeria Maximilla; all converted to Christianity and were subsequently martyred.[8] Upon the failure of Maxentius to make Catherine yield by way of torture, he tried to win the beautiful and wise princess over by proposing marriage. The saint refused, declaring that her spouse was Jesus Christ, to whom she had consecrated her virginity. The furious emperor condemned Catherine to death on a spiked breaking wheel, but, at her touch, it shattered.[7] Maxentius finally had her beheaded.

Burial A tradition dating to about 800 states that angels carried her corpse to Mount Sinai. Her body was discovered around the year 800 at Mount Sinai, with hair still growing and a constant stream of healing oil issuing from her body.[9] In the 6th century, the Eastern Emperor Justinian had established what is now Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt (which is in fact dedicated to the Transfiguration of Christ).

She is generally believed to have been eighteen at the time of her death. Her feast day is November 25, and in celebration of this day in France, unmarried women pray for her intercession to find them husbands. These unmarried women are referred to as “Catherinettes” and their friends make elaborate hats, or bonnets, for them, using the colors yellow for faith and green for wisdom. The Catherinettes are crowned with these bonnets and make pilgrimages to St. Catherine’s statue in their local churches. Also of note and pertaining to France, she is believed to have appeared to Joan of Arc.

Saint Catherine has patronage over many things; because of her chastity, she is the patroness of unmarried women; because of her scholarship and skill in debate, she is the patroness of apologists, archivists, educators, female students, jurists, lawyers, librarians, libraries, philosophers, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries, stenographers, and theologians; because of her association with the breaking wheel and wheels in general, she is the patroness of craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners), mechanics, millers, and wheelwrights; because of her beheading, she is patroness of knife sharpeners; because of her martyrdom, she is the patroness of dying people and nurses; because of a tradition in France on her feast day relating to her patronage of unmarried women, she is patroness of milliners, hat-makers, tanners, and haberdashers.

She is associated with a number of items, or attributes, and when depicted in art these items are often shown with her. A crown, either atop her head or at her feet, denoting her royal birth; a book, held open or closed in her hands, and perhaps her arguing with the pagan philosophers denoting her eloquence and wisdom; a bridal veil and ring denoting her mystical marriage to Jesus Christ; a dove as one legend states she was fed by a dove while imprisoned; a scourge, the breaking wheel, either whole or itself broken at her touch, and the sword that finally ended her life by decapitation; (hailstones are also listed in places, I got nothing). The type of firework known as the Catherine wheel is named for her.

Additional references for information about Saint Catherine of Alexandria can be found here, here, here, and here.

And now for the parallels, the reason I’m boring you all (all two of you) with these details about a long dead, and likely entirely legendary figure.

Like Saint Catherine, Beth is the daughter of a leader. Hershel Greene, initially of the Greene family farm and later of the prison. Before the fall of civilization, Beth was a student and after she doesn’t start out understanding what’s really going on in the apocalypse. When faced with it, she thinks she wants to die, but when she tries to kill herself she has an epiphany and chooses to live; this is rather like Saint Catherine’s path to conversion, in how she devotes her life to learning, then experiences a vision and becomes Christian.

Beth was “imprisoned” in Grady Memorial Hospital, was beaten, but never broken. Carol and the others "visited her" in her prison and she converted people, like Noah and Dr. Edwards, to another way of thinking. She broke their system by challenging it and getting Dawn killed after having killed the biggest offenders, Gorman and O'Donnell. She was shot, but didn’t die. Saint Catherine was imprisoned and tortured, many came to visit her and were converted. They tried to execute her and she not only survived, she broke the tool of her execution, symbolically breaking their system. Both were eighteen at the time of their imprisonment and attempted execution.

Beth was carried out of the hospital by Daryl, who wears angel wings, and left in a trunk after running from 800 walkers. She wasn't dead so her body would not corrupt. Additionally, she is immune to the infection and incorruptible by it (another way she “breaks the wheel” by breaking the infection). Her immunity will be the source of the cure and thus heal others. Saint Catherine's body was carried to Mount Sinai by angels and was found incorrupt and issuing healing oil in the year 800.

The mystical marriage of Saint Catherine is interesting; one variation on her conversion involves her search for a husband that matched her in intellect, nobility, and beauty and a hermit in the desert who, after a vision of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, went to Saint Catherine and told her of the spouse she desired. This hermit eventually baptised her, preparing her for her mystical marriage to Jesus. C@rol, who was a hermit for a while, brought Beth’s knife (an attribute of Saint Catherine, a small sword) to Daryl, giving him his lady’s favor, essentially marrying them (more here).

Saint Catherine’s reason for her refusal of the offer of marriage from the man who was trying to have her executed makes me think of the metas about 4x12 Still and the blood splatter on the white sweater foreshadowing Beth losing her virginity with Daryl (here and here, though there are more). I can just imagine Negan asking her to join his harem and Beth refusing by saying she's already promised to someone.

Bonus connections!

Beth’s father, Hershel, was beheaded with a sword like Saint Catherine; I know this isn’t a direct parallel as this happened to her father and not her, but I think the connection is solid enough with him being her father and her having watched it happen.

The spoked breaking wheel rather resembles a clock, which is heavily connected with Beth.

Saint Catherine appeared to Joan of Arc and counseled her; in 5x04 Slabtown Beth brought some small comfort to Joan during her confinement after her amputation.

Coda aired on November 30, the Sunday following Saint Catherine’s feast day of November 25.

Saint Catherine is a patroness of mechanics, and Daryl, Beth’s apocalypse husband, is the mechanic of the group (bonus bonus, he rides motorcycles which have spoked wheels like the breaking wheel).

The blond walker in the yellow wheelchair (mentioned here, here, and here, towards the bottom in all three) with the wounded left foot in 4x06 Live Bait is connected with Beth through her signature yellow color and wounded left foot in 5x13 Alone, and the spoked wheels of the wheelchair resemble the breaking wheel, symbolically representing the hospital and foreshadowing her breaking of it.

In Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, there is a braid in Catherine's hair that starts at her left temple; Beth often wore a braid on the left side in her ponytail.

The traditional colors of the bonnets made for the Catherinettes celebrating Saint Catherine’s day in France were yellow for faith and green for wisdom; Beth has been strongly associated with yellow and faith and her last name is Greene. Also both she and her father have been associated with wisdom.

Not to mention the St. Catherine of ALEXANDRIA thing.

The final parallel I would like to highlight is the breaking of the wheel as the breaking of the cycle the show is currently stuck in, like a pair of millstones, the runner stone circling on the bedstone seemingly endlessly. The official synopsis for season 7 says “This half season is about these characters starting over. The overall theme of the season is beginning again.” The first episode of season 6 was called First Time Again. In season 5 after Terminus they begin again together. The Governor destroys the prison and they are forced to begin again, scattered. How many times will we take it once again from the top, everyone? (Washington D.C. = D.C. = da Capo, anyone? “Da Capo” is Italian for “from the head” and shares the same Latin root with “decapitate.”)

I mean, that's what the comic has done, over and over and over again; the war with the governor, All Out War, The Whisperer War—same shit different day. Abraham references this in his speech in 5x02 Strangers, “Wake up in the morning, fight the undead pricks, forage for food, go to sleep at night with two eyes open, rinse and repeat?” as encouragement to get them to join his mission to D.C.

Beth’s return is a way to break that cycle for the show—in the endless string of deaths and losses, finally they get someone back.

Morgan says, “People can come back, Rick.” in 6x15 East. Morgan says it to Rick just like Rick said it to the governor when he came to take the prison. Rick says, "Everyone who's alive right now. Everyone who's made it this far. We've all done the worst kinds of things just to stay alive. But we can still come back. We're not too far gone. We get to come back. I know... we all can change." in 4x08 Too Far Gone.

In 6x15 East, Morgan also says, "It—it's all a circle. Everything gets a return." Everything comes full circle with Beth’s survival, she’s not just “another dead girl” as she says in 4x12 Still.

The circle, the cycle, the wheel—Beth will break the wheel just like St. Catherine of Alexandria. Once more from the beginning, but skip to a different ending (da Capo al Coda).

[himboholhorse-moving]

1 2 4 7 8 9 13 18 20 26 27 29 30 32 39 40 41 43/44 45 46 49 51 53 55 56 57 59 63 65 that is. so many dghsdghsdgv I'm sorry I just see an ask meme and go crazy aaaa go stupid aaaa. You can just answer whichever u like from those!! also 69(nice): you seem rly nice and funny from your 🅱️osts and I appreciate u... I hope you can find better irl friends who aren't trash

HDSKFJKS I completely understand but lucky for u I LOVE to talk !!

1) How are you?

Pretty good, actually!! Which is a nice change of pace. I went to Walmart with some friends yesterday and got a few things, baked a family recipe that my friends LOVE, and finally did my laundry (it’s been a couple weeks we love depression and executive dysfunction dfhkjsfd). I went to Cracker Barrel with some friends and earlier and played a 4-way game of Tetris after. :3c

2) Post a picture of yourself.

Here you go !!

4) What is your entire name?

Sierra Alexis and my last name is something constantly misspelled so I’ll give you the name of a historical figure whose name is a letter off from mine: George B. McClellan, to whom I may or may not be related because last name variations are fuckin’ WEIRD.

7) Your zodiac/horoscope and if you think it fits your personality.

I’m a Capricorn sun and moon, and Libra rising !! And from what I’ve read on Twitter from various astrologers, like Milkstrology, I LOVE her, I’d say it’s pretty accurate with my personality!! I like to say Capricorn’s aren’t cold bitches but, I Have A Tendency To Be One !!

8) What did you do on your last birthday?

God what DID I do on my last birthday… it was in January, so like, I SHOULD remember… OH I went to IHOP with my friends !! I share a birthday with another friend and I got a JoJo notebook and something called a Fuggler! They’re stuffed animals more or less but designed to be “ugly.” I got one that looks like Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty because I LOVE Gritty… he’s so fun and funky.

9) What is one thing you’d like to accomplish before your next birthday?

Get all my requests in my inbox over on my writing blog done KJHFDJKSF it’s been a few months and life has been. Hectic to say the least.

13) If you could change your eye color, would you?

There’s so much weird as hell brown-eye-phobia so like… I think blue eyes would be pretty neat. OR PURPLE… give me some unnatural eye colors pls...

18) Do you have any tattoos?

Not yet!! I’m going to get one the next time I go back home for break. :3c And I have a few ideas for other ones!! I wanna get a big-ass “Dragon Age: Origins” tattoo that’s the dragon on the cover on my thigh. I also wanna get a DA2 and “Inquisition” tattoo… and the Joestar birthmark… too many ideas… 

20) Left or right handed?

Right-handed !! I could have been left-handed or ambidextrous if I broke my arm AFTER I started kindergarten, but alas that was before.

26) Something you are working on right now:

This !! But also the script for my next podcast episode that I record on uhhh Monday I think. Should probably figure that one out dsjfjhsf

27) Do you have any “rules” about food?

I answered that in the last ask !!

29) What would you say is your best quality?

I also answered this in the last ask !!

30) What do you think you’re really good at?

Writing, I’d say! And memorizing trivia about the stuff I’m super into. If it’s stuff pertaining to “M*A*S*H” or old movies or TV shows or actors or specific historical events, I will know that shit FOR LIFE. Don’t ask me to do math pls thank u

32) What talent do you wish you’d been born with?

I wish I was able to do stuff with music. That was never really in my blood, despite all the music classes they make you take in elementary school. I just never learned how to memorize or read sheet music. :/ I would have loved to play violin, tho… my friend plays and she says I would have been a good cellist.

39) Do you sleep with a stuffed toy?

YES… have for years. I still have my Care Bear from when I was 5, Gritty as mentioned above, a plush of my school’s mascot, and a little Fugo !! He’s so tiny.

40) What do you think about the most?

Everything and constantly and all at once. But the past really because I can never let stuff go and even the small things I mess up on haunt me forever… Wish that wasn’t the case but it is !!

41) Share two habits:

Biting my nails and having a very specific routine in which I get ready when I wake up. Like, I’ve gotta go brush my hair before I put my important cards in my left pocket, then put on my silver bracelet, then my beaded bracelet, then my earbuds in my right pocket, then put my earrings in. I HAVE to do it in that order…

And other oddities that include, like, if I need to go around something I HAVE to follow the urge to go one way and not the other, lest I feel the need to go back and fix it. And then which foot goes first before I reach a crack in the sidewalk, or up or down a curb, etc.

43) What are your career goals?

If I can just make people happy or get some kind of joy out of the things I do, I’d call that enough. :)

44) What is your ideal career?

Mmm, either a film historian or a film professor !! Preferably at the college I’m at right now but wherever the wind takes me, I’ll go! Or a Twitch streamer or YouTuber, it really depends on my mood jdhfjskf

45) Is your life anything like it was two years ago?

It was pretty much the same !! Freshman year was pretty lively, I didn’t have a job on campus yet though, or my podcast. Everything else is basically the same!

46) Do you replay things that have happened in your head?

CONSTANTLY… good or bad it’ll play back over and over and over again.

49) Do you have any phobias?

HOO BOY, DO I… fear of heights; fear of insects/bugs/arachnids/bees/wasps; I have a strong dislike of the number 13 but I don’t know if it’s a phobia, I just. REALLY hate it; the unknown, more or less what lurks somewhere beyond where I can see. Not so much a fear of the dark with that one, just what could BE in it.

51) Are you allergic to anything? If so, what?

I answered this in my last ask, as well!

53) Ever come close to death?

Two or three times, maybe? Two of them involved what’s called a laryngospasm, typically it can happen when your sick, which is what happened to me both times. Basically your throat just closes up on your for a hot minute and you can’t breathe. The first time I genuinely thought I was going to die (and my dad still sent me to school that day… HOE), the second time I was also sick and was losing/had lost my voice DURING A JOB RETREAT and it happened in the middle of the night so that was funny sitting there gasping for breath in the pitch dark.

At the FIRST retreat I went on for that job, you had to take pictures as part of a scavenger hunt, and the place used to be an old military fort, so there were still the old bunkers there. We had to take one on top of it and I was taking the picture, and it’s a wide shot so I go to take a step back but before I do I look behind me. If I hadn’t I would have fallen a good 10-15 feet down onto solid Civil War-era bunker concrete. I’d consider that being a “close to death” moment because I really could have died!

55) A random fact about yourself:

I have a half-brother !! My sis and I finally found him after her 23andMe results came back (which she decided to do despite us being like THE GOVERNMENT WILL COLLECT OUR DATA) and we didn’t think our mom would be happy she found him but she was !! My sis might reach out and contact him, she just wanted our mom’s permission first to do it.

56) What are three things most people don’t know about you?

Well, that I have a half-brother. I don’t mention it a lot. Aside from y’all on here and my sister, most everyone else doesn’t know I’m nonbinary! Everyone else knows I’m bi though lmao. And that there were times I’d stretch or bend the truth or lie about something just to impress someone else. It’s a… Bad Habit. Another thing is that most people don’t know I like coffee? Like I need to put a shit ton of creamer in with it because I’m a Bitch, but yeah.

57) An unknown fact about your life:

I wouldn’t call this an “unknown” fact but I’d used to go to work with my dad every now and again when he worked at the Home Depot and he was assistant manager. I’d either chill in the back room which was an office he shared with two other guys, or walk around the store with him. I had my own apron, too, which was my name with “Mini Mac” next to it, “Mac” being my dad’s nickname and something easier to say than my last name. I actually helped a few customers out so I wonder if I should have gotten paid for that despite being like, ages 9-13 when I’d go jshfkjd

And I guess I technically tested video games as a kid? Basically, when my dad was stationed at Fort Knox, they’d get demos of video games that hadn’t come out yet to test I suppose? and I still have a few somewhere. He’d hand them off to me and I’d play them so there’s that.

59) Five weird things that you like:

Eating globs of wasabi for no reason.

Scaring my friends also for no reason.

I wouldn’t say using cotton swabs to get wax out of your ears because it feels good is weird, just more medically inadvisable if anything.

When I was younger I’d like to floss really hard because the slight pain from it felt good. Young me was a #Freaque KJHDFJJDHF

I don’t know if being fond of alphabetizing and reorganizing things is considered weird but I LOVE doing that.

63) A quote you try to live by:

“It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll; / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” It’s from the poem “Invictus” and the last two lines are what I’m getting tattooed !!

65) Weird things you do when you’re alone:

Practice the “Lucky Star” dance. I GOT THE LYRICS DOWN… JUST NEED TO DO THE DANCE NOW…

69) Leave me a compliment:

“you seem rly nice and funny from your 🅱️osts and I appreciate u... I hope you can find better irl friends who aren't trash”

Anon pls 🥺 I do my best to be nice but my friend really do test me sometimes... my feelings bounce back n forth like if they do something my feelings can switch to angry or like, hate, and then if they do something nice I’ll like them again. It sucks but ! I just take it one day at a time. Anon I care for u 💜💜💜

[from-the-clouds]

Something to Believe In -Chapter 9: Frigid (A Poe Dameron x OC Fic)

While I will try to post the full story on here, you can find the rest of it on AO3 and FanFiction.net. Leave me a comment or review!

Story Summary: Her whole life, Kyra has felt a call to something greater. She joins The Resistance to flee from a life that wasn’t her own. Content with her low-profile job within the medical corps, General Organa assigns her to work with Black Squadron. When Kyra meets Commander Poe Dameron, he helps her discover what she is capable of. Takes place before/during TFA, slow-burn Poe/OC

Chapter Summary: Kyra’s mission with Poe doesn’t go as much as expected, and they end up sharing a cramped hotel room for the night.

Chapter Word Count: 4,017

Warnings: None

It’s been awhile since I posted anything, but I am still accepting requests for imagines, so drop into my inbox! I finally finished spring semester and I'm going to have a lot more free time soon :) As always, please let me know what you think :)

Although she could have taken the opportunity to sleep on the way to Hoth, Kyra stayed awake, chatting idly with Poe. Something was keeping her up, some vague inclination in the back of her mind that something was going to go wrong. She tried to dismiss it, but it was persistent, and she chalked up the paranoia to exhaustion. Rather than sleeping, she ended up taking extra shifts at the hospital, since a nasty flu was sweeping through member's of The Resistance. So many pilots, mechanics and workers were dehydrated with high fevers, sore throats, and body aches. She'd spent basically all night giving saline IV's and issuing medications to quell the fevers since they were short-staffed. Kyra only prayed she wouldn't catch anything, at least not until she got back from the mission; she hoped her lack of sleep didn't catch up to her.

She didn't know what exactly to expect from Hoth. All she knew was that it was supposed to be snowy and cold and desolate. They'd brought proper apparel for the terrain, so she wasn't too worried. They would be landing near an abandoned Rebel Base, where a few former Alliance fighters had settled after the Galactic Empire fell. Surprisingly enough, Kyra did not know a whole lot about the war that had ended years before she was born. It'd always been a curiosity of hers, but she hadn't read her way to that area of the Resistance's library.

A noise she'd never heard Poe's x-wing make startled her and she immediately straightened up, the feeling of dread intensifying until her head pounded. Placing her thumb and forefinger to her temples, she leaned forward and furrowed her brow, muttering to herself to calm down before speaking up.

"Everything okay?" she asked Poe, who she could hear shifting around in the cockpit behind her, frantically pressing buttons and flipping switches.

For a moment he was silent, preoccupied, which only intensified the throbbing in her head as her stomach twisted. "The engine," he murmured. "It's overheating...but we're almost there. We should be okay," he said, and for the first time, Kyra didn't hear the same confidence in his voice she was used to. Instead, his voice wavered slightly with trepidation.

The headache faded to a faint annoyance, and Kyra tried to occupy her mind by running over General Organa's instructions at the debrief. There were specific people they needed to talk to, and she ran over their names in her head. Unfortunately, Kyra was distracted once more by a whirring noise coming from the ships engine she had never heard before. Poe clicked buttons, trying to control the situation, but to no avail. Kyra didn't want to pry him, assuming he knew what he was doing. Her trying to help would most likely serve only to annoy.

She heard Poe curse under his breath, which concerned her because he usually remained so calm. "I'm going to take us out of light speed and try to land. Hang on," He shouted over the increasing sound of the engine whirring. The familiar lightheadedness and pull she felt coming out of lightspeed seemed to only worsen her headache, the pressure she felt on her chest restricting and overwhelming her.

Then they were flying above Hoth, she could see it's terrain, jagged peaks of mountain poking up through gray storm-clouds, snippets of it's smooth, white surface peaking through the spaces between. From up here, despite their current situation, it looked peaceful. Kyra couldn't help Poe, who was still desperately trying to safely bring them to the ground.

"I'm sorry, Kyra," he yelled over the roaring of the engine, and then she felt her stomach drop as they plummeted to the ground.

There wasn't much of the crash that Kyra remembered. The ground came closer and closer to them until she could begin to make out details; small patches of pine trees, tall drifts of snow. The terrain was like an ocean of fresh, fallen dust. At first, Kyra thought of her father and sister, whom she hadn't spoken to since she joined The Resistance. She had refused to. She thought of her grandmother, and how much she missed her. Despite the years since she had died, the pain had never really subsided, and Kyra longed to know all her secrets she never got to tell.

Surely, Kyra thought as the ground grew closer, this was it. Instead of screaming, she felt peace, calm. An energy passed through her, time slowed down, she could hear Poe's racing heart and the steady beat of her own, she closed her eyes, but still could see the ground closing in.

And then the impact came, and the peace disappeared.

For some reason, Kyra didn't know whether she had blacked out or whether she'd been conscious all along, but her first action was to get out of the cockpit. She flexed her fingers and toes, then slowly worked her way up her arms and legs, assessing each body part before trying to move. The pressure in her head had subsided, and she noticed she was still strapped in to the cockpit. The roof was peeled back, and the wind kicked up tornadoes of snow that clouded her vision. Poe wasn't there. She felt her heart clench in panic.

"Poe?" she said his name softly, before shouting. "POE!"

Black One had landed in a snow bank, which must have cushioned their fall. Half the ship was submerged in the fluffy cover, only the cockpit rose above the ground. Kyra exited the ship, unbuckling her helmet and chucking it to the ground unceremoniously. She was growing more panicked as Poe was nowhere to be found, when suddenly, an orange flight suit directly below caught her eye.

Lying on his back against the nose of the ship was Poe. No visible injuries marked him, but he wasn't moving, and Kyra made her way through the deep snow to him.

"Kyra," he murmured as she approached, his eyes lighting up. He straightened up slightly.

"Are you alright?" Kyra asked, and Poe nodded. "Are you injured?"

"I don't...think so," he mumbled. "I just needed a moment to catch my breath."

Kyra nodded, examining him with her eyes. "Let me check you out, okay?"

Poe frowned, but reluctantly agreed. Kyra leaned forward, pushed his hair out of his eyes to examine his forehead for bumps or cuts. She ran her fingers through his thick, dark curls to feel his skull for any bumps and bruises, her hands then finding his neck to be sure he hadn't broken it. Determined, she refused to look him in the eye while this close to him, as it felt wrong in some way to be so close. His eyes focused in on her. "Where are we?" she asked.

"Hoth," he answered, watching her intently.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" she asked, making a "W" with her digits.

"Three," He answered. Kyra pulled a flashlight from her medical kit and shined it in his eyes, watching his pupils dilate quickly.

"Well, you aren't concussed," she said, but moved on, carefully helping him move his arms, legs, examining them for damage. Kyra felt his eyes on her, so intent, and her face grew warm under his gaze. It made her even more embarrassed, since she'd managed to assess damage to many individuals without feeling so flustered. But Poe was perfectly fine, and as Kyra finished up, seemed to snap out of the uncharacteristic trance he'd been in. Shock, she guessed, but she didn't say anything, because he answered.

"I think I got the wind knocked out of me," he said, and Kyra smirked. "I'm so sorry Kyra, Gods, that was scary. How about you? Are you okay?"

"So far so good," she said. "We both might be a little sore tomorrow, but I'm sure we can handle it."

"I'm so sorry, Kyra I didn't mean to-"

"It's fine, Poe. We're okay."

"If I had BB-8 with me maybe he could have payed more attention to the engine, I didn't realize until it was too late."

Although Kyra had somehow managed to avoid it, or ignore it, in her rush to find Poe, it suddenly hit her like a ton of bricks. Her body convulsed and her teeth began chattering together. "It's so...so cold." She managed, instinctively pulling her arms around herself in an effort to warm up.

"Coats," Poe agreed suddenly, seemingly agreeing to the sentiment. He climbed back into the x-wing and pulled out the coats, offering her one that she slipped into graciously.

"I need to check the engine," Poe said. "Stay in the cockpit and try to warm up."

"You don't need any help?" she asked.

"I'll only be a moment," he answered, and Kyra nodded, taking his advice and curling up in the cockpit. She reached for her datapad only to find it shattered on the floor of the x-wing. She frowned. All her information was on there, even information pertaining to the mission.

When Poe returned his face was grim. "Just as I suspected."

"What's that?" Kyra frowned as she sensed his frustration.

"The engine's shot. It go too overheated. We need more coolant and coolant feeds if we're going to get her up and running again."

Kyra sat back and watched him as he rifled through the cockpit to find his datapad. When he finally found it and powered it up, he struggled to find a signal for a moment before he could finally get the information he needed. Kyra watched as the sky began to darken, the sun was lowering in the sky and she saw dark clouds rolling in behind them. Kyra shivered, and she wasn't sure if it was a result of the cold or because she still couldn't seem to shake the feeling that something was off.

"We haven't landed too far away from the old base. It'll take us about three hours to get there on foot, which isn't ideal, but it could be worse," Poe interrupted her thoughts. He shook his head and bit his lower lip. "Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of options."

"I'll be okay to walk," Kyra said. "I suspect moving around will be better than sitting here freezing to death."

Poe nodded, and offered her his hand, which she took to help lift herself from the ship. She gathered the few belongings she'd brought with her and placed them in her backpack along with her medical kit and slung it over her shoulder. Poe and Kyra both changed into more casual clothes, as the orange flight suits certainly didn't allow them to be inconspicuous. It only took a few moments for them to gather her things before they were off.

Moving didn't do much to help the cold. It was horribly cold, a bone-deep cold that didn't disappear that nipped at her fingers, toes, and face - any piece of exposed skin was subjected to it's searing touch. Kyra didn't even bother trying to talk to Poe. Opening her mouth only made her colder. As much as she tried to ignore it, she couldn't. The wind certainly didn't help.

The three hour walk to get into town felt like five, and by the time they arrived, night had fallen. A few shops were still open, but none of them could get them the supplies they needed. The settlement was larger than Kyra had expected, but based on the stares and side-eyed glances they got from the residents who were scurrying home in the dark, the town didn't often get visitors.

Poe leaned into her, and murmured in her ear. "I suggest we try to find a place to stay for the night," he suggested. "We can get some food and a good nights sleep. I doubt we'll have much luck trying to ask around this late at night - plus, it looks like there's a storm coming."

He was right. The wind had picked up, howling, spiraling loose snow from the ground.

They found a small inn towards the outskirts of town. Before they entered the lobby, Poe turned to her. "Remember, we aren't with the Resistance. We're just traveling through, okay?"

Kyra nodded, following him inside. She expected a blast of warm air but was disappointed when she felt none in the lobby. Although there was a fireplace in the small lobby, it didn't do much to quell the cold. Kyra shivered.

"Hello," Poe greeted the man behind the counter, who eyed them suspiciously as they approached. "I was wondering if I could get a room for the night?" he asked.

The man frowned, but nodded. "We've only got one room left for the night. You on vacation?"

Poe gave an easy laugh, "I'm afraid not. My wife and I were traveling and our ship broke down a few miles out of town," Poe's hand reached up to settle on Kyra's lower back, and she instinctively leaned into him, playing along, offering the hotel owner a soft smile. Despite the act, the warmth of Poe's body offered a bit of refuge from the cold. "We thought it'd be best to find a place for the night."

The man's features relaxed at Poe's explanation, and he smirked before turning around to grab a datapad and a key. "You're in luck, we've only got one room left for the night. That'll be 100 units," he said, and Poe handed over the money. "The price is cheaper than usual, because our heater's broken. Every room has a fireplace and firewood, so that should help a lot. Your room is on the second floor to the left."

Poe nodded. "Thank you." He took the key, his hand still resting lightly on Kyra's waist, and lead them out of the lobby.

"Your wife?" she teased as they headed upstairs, out of sight of the owner.

Poe smirked slightly "Anything else would have been too suspicious."

"Mhm," Kyra raised her eyebrows slightly.

"Oh stop," he dropped his arm from her waist and swatted playfully at her, rolling his eyes before they finally arrived at the room. Kyra was growing anxious for a nice warm bed and meal, but all her expectations were shattered when she only saw one large bed in the middle of the room, no couches or chairs or anything that could work as a substitute. Her brows knit together in frustration, but she wasn't sure whether or not to voice her concern.

"So much for escaping the cold," Poe huffed, passing her to go to the windows. Kyra heard the wind pick up outside and watched Poe lock them and close the blinds. Kyra chattered her teeth in agreement.

"Let's start a fire," she suggested. Her arms and legs were lagging, the exhaustion from a lack of sleep hitting her. Still, she crossed the room and began stacking some firewood in the fireplace. The few half-burnt pieces that still lay within it she gathered under the fire to use as kindling, and a box of matches with the motel name on it sat on the mantle. She lit the match and placed it under the wood, blowing on it carefully, and within minutes the wood was burning.

"Thank Gods," Kyra sighed in relief, removing the gloves from her hands and placing her aching fingers close to the flames. Poe crouched beside her, mimicking her actions.

"I hope this helps," he murmured, and Kyra watched the flames cast shadows across his profile.

The fire helped, but not enough, especially as the storm picked up outside. Kyra moved away to sit on the bed and give it time to warm the room. However, she couldn't help but let out a frustrated sigh, which caused Poe to turn to her.

"You alright?" he asked, his brows pulling together.

She nodded, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the headboard, closing her eyes. "It's still freezing."

Poe stood from his place in front of the fire and walked towards her, sitting next to Kyra. He hesitated a moment before carefully reaching out, placing his arm around her shoulders and pulling her close to him. Whereas normally, she might feel uncomfortable, or maybe even flustered, instead she knew he was just trying to keep them both warm. And as much as she hated to admit it, it was working.

Kyra couldn't remember the last time she'd been so close to someone, or even had someone touch her affectionately. Although she knew Poe wasn't been affectionate, it was certainly welcome and friendly, and she appreciated it. Carefully, she rested her head on his shoulder, and his grip tightened.

"I want to apologize again about what happened earlier..." Poe said, staring into the flames. "With the ship."

"What do you mean?" Kyra asked.

"The way we crashed...it was a miracle both of us survived," he mumbled. "I really thought that was the end." Kyra glanced at him, seeing the pensive frustration across his face. He thought it was his fault.

"Oh, Poe..." Kyra murmured, using her free hand to reach around his waist and pull him into a hug. "You did nothing wrong. It was out of your control."

"I thought we were going to die," he said, shaking his head. "I was thinking about my dad...I got in an argument with him the other day and now I'm regretting it. That could have been the last time we talked to each other."

"It's not...we're okay," she soothed him, pausing and biting her lip, unsure of whether to continue. "I haven't talked to my father in years, though. I know how you feel."

"Years...why not?" he asked.

"You know, I never told you why I joined the Resistance." Kyra said, shaking her head. "At least...I never really told you."

Poe turned his head to her, his eyes dark, brooding. But he was intent, listening. Once again, his gaze made Kyra blush so she turned away and continued. "My father was the chief of the village I grew up in. He made the community work, he made the big decisions," she began. "He wanted me to take his place once he grew old." Kyra shook her head. "I always felt this pull to do great things, to be a part of something great. Something inside me would call to me, it felt so strong. But when he saw I wasn't dedicated to the job...he forced me into something that almost ruined my life."

Kyra paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She didn't want to tell Poe about the marriage. Not yet. It made her feel dirty and wrong, all those years being married to someone she'd never cared about. Now wasn't the time...maybe never.

"My grandmother got sick, and I came home for her funeral. On Dantooine I met a recruitment officer for The Resistance and long story short, he asked me to join. I thought maybe this was my calling. After my grandma died I told him I'd be leaving. He tried to stop me but realized there was no use. And I haven't spoken to him since..."

Poe looked away from her. "And do you think this is your calling?"

"Are you asking me this as my commanding officer?" She cocked an eyebrow, unsure of how to answer his question.

Poe smirked slightly. "No, Kyra. I'm asking this as your friend."

Kyra smiled, feeling a bit of the tension in the air break. "I'm in a better place than I was before..." she trailed off. "But there's still an emptiness...I can't explain it." Quickly, she changed the subject. "Who knows. Some people go their whole lives without finding their purpose. Maybe I'm one of those people."

Poe squeezed her shoulder. "I'm sure you'll figure it out."

Kyra shook her head. "Anyways, that's enough blabbering about me."

"No, Kyra...I'm glad you felt like you could tell me that," he said softly.

"Well," she smirked. "Don't go thinking your special or anything."

Poe laughed, and the atmosphere lightened a bit. Kyra was thankful. Their previous conversation gave her the chance to ask a question that'd been weighing on her mind. "So...this might not be my place to act...but what is the significance of Lor San Tekka?" she asked. "I mean, why is he so important to The Resistance?"

Poe sighed. "Have you ever heard of Luke Skywalker?" he asked.

Kyra nodded, the name ringing a bell, before she smiled. "Yeah...actually. My grandmother used to tell me stories about him. He was a Jedi, right?"

"Yeah," Poe answered. "He's The General's brother. They fought together during the Rebellion."

Kyra felt her forehead crease. "You mean he's real? That's not just a story?"

Poe gave her an incredulous look. "Of course he's real."

Kyra shook her head. "My grandma made it sound like magic...The Force...The Jedi. All these characters. She told me about Leia, his sister...I guess I never made the connection that was General Organa."

Poe sighed. "Well, anyways. Luke Skywalker had his own Jedi training academy, but disappeared years ago, after Leia's son, Ben, turned to the dark side. That's a whole other story," he began. "No one knows where he is, but he left a map to his whereabouts in fragments. The Resistance has collected every part of the map, except for the last one, which is believed to be possessed by Lor San Tekka, an old friend of Luke's."

Kyra shivered, a sense of familiarity passing over her. She felt like she'd heard this story before. "So that's why were trying to find him? To ultimately find Luke."

Poe shook his head. "Truthfully, I'm skeptical he can do much to help The Resistance. But he's General Organa's brother, so I can't deny her requests. The First Order wants to find him as well, which is why we had the run-in with Captain Terex on our last mission. It's why we need to be careful here, so we aren't caught."

Nodding, Kyra tried her best to process the information that Poe had just shared with her. She felt so ignorant to the events of the original rebellion against the Galactic Empire. How could she have known so little about it? How could she have thought Luke wasn't real. She perplexed herself.

Poe squeezed her shoulder again and she found him gazing once more at her. Normally she tried to shake off feeling flustered but this was different, it felt more intimate all the sudden and Kyra grew hot under his touch.

Clearing her throat, she spoke. "I think it's best that we head to bed now," she offered him a weak smile.

Poe gave a gentle nod in agreement, removing his arm from around her and getting off the bed, heading into the refresher. Without the warmth of his arm around her, Kyra felt chilled to the bone again.

[gravitascivics]

IT’S A “RAINFORREST” OUT THERE

Many determining factors that affect the ability of a society or, more specifically, a polity to meet its challenges need to be balanced.  Some, if not many, of a polity’s elements or attributes are often in conflict.  For example, should citizens support the aims of one neighbor or that of another when those aims are in conflict?  Should the use of one of their properties be used in a way that bothers or more seriously infringes on the aesthetics of another is just one possible conflict.

In a related notion, this blog has reported what are the motivations that lead people to be communal despite these conflicts.  Michael Sandel offers three types or sources of motivations:  reciprocity, sentiment, and personal self-fulfillment.[1] How they function in a landscape of turmoil – at times in the extreme – is worth knowing and worth teaching civics students.

         The question becomes relevant as a polity goes about its business.  Those situations will arise when commitments and other determining conditions will be in contention.  Richard Dagger offers the following:  in one’s concern over reciprocity and sentiment there can be an issue or development when one needs to choose between the interests of neighbors and those of people in some foreign land.  

How should one choose?  Intuitively, one will side with those whom one has an association – such as fellow citizens.  Of course, considerations over the issue in question are important.  For example, is the survival of a foreign population at odds with some convenience or inconvenience of a more local population? Then perhaps the moral and prudent choice is to side with the foreigner.  One can only ascribe weights to such factors and not look for hard and fast rules of thumb that say, for example, “citizens of my country always come first.”[2]

This posting aims to further Dagger’s analysis. In his review of Sandel’s “motivations,” Dagger points out some very important practicalities.  Yes, when one joins in a social arrangement, be it a social group, a legal, or a political arrangement, one usually does so to advance personal interests.  This is legitimate if, once joined, one is true to the provisions of the agreement that sets up the arrangement.  If the arrangement reflects the attributes of a true partnership, then the arrangement is an association.

But in general, whether the arrangement is a partnership or not, one has a legitimate bias for parochial relationships. This is not only wise in pursuing mutual aims, but natural.  One has a natural affinity for the familiar[3] and that strongly pertains to political concerns.  But does that not pose a challenge for the liberated version of federalism?

To remind the reader, this blog has argued against an earlier version of federalism to which this nation ascribed; that being parochial/traditional federalism.  As Andrew Marantz points out, this nation was created by white men for white men.[4]  But even they seemed to think at some idealistic level that this was not right either morally or practically.  In any event, their written covenants and compacts – at least, at the national level – did not proclaim such ownership for that group.

Instead, those documents proclaim the opposite. They proclaim an equality among the populous.  This blogger has been taught that even the gender discrepancies in law were justified – or more accurately, rationalized – as not being instances of inequality, but of attempts to maintain the cohesion of families.  

That lesson is considered with a jaundiced eye, but the thinking was that the father spoke for the family or household in his voting, in his ownership of property, and in his position in the community.  Of course, this did not satisfy the provisions of federalism unless one defined women as deficient or equivalent to children. This could not stand, given the overall rationale of federalism and its provisions for equality.

But this goes a bit astray.  The concern here is the function the above motivations play in maintaining and advancing a polity – a society.  Reciprocity – even where there is no sentiment or understanding of the needs of self-fulfillment – calls for one to cooperate and make nice with those close by.  Afterall, one depends on those people most immediately to derive the advantages one enjoys by being a member of an arrangement.  But the concern becomes that when things don’t go swimmingly with these cohorts, what sustains the bonds?

The first basic response to this possibility – occurring from time to time in everyone’s life – is the self-awareness that in one’s modes of behavior the inevitable contention needs a strategy. “This is how I handle a debate with my neighbor, my partner, my customer, my fellow city dweller, my fellow state resident, my fellow countryperson, or my fellow inhabitant of the planet.”  At each level the bonds vary, and this is no small matter.  It affects what specific strategy is employed.  But when one realizes that a strategy is needed that is a big step.

Short of a strategy – which, by the way, can adjust given the factors involved – one is apt to react without thought and be short-sighted.  Emotions will hold sway and resulting behaviors are apt to be regrettable.  And this can be consequential in furthering relationships; after all, at the reciprocal stage, reciprocities are bound to be aimed back at a person who acts impulsively.

Also, strategies allow one to take into account the nature of a relationship.  Is it with a neighbor or a professional cohort?  Is it with a fellow worker, an anonymous person, or with a known person?  Is it with a superior or an underling?  Is it in person or over the phone or through a letter exchange?  These and other factors might affect what leads to effective intercourse.

And, according to Dagger, each reflects decisions over the priority one places on the issue or on the other party.  And here, still holding to the basic level of reciprocity, one places different levels of priority on who the other party is and what the issue is.  This can become complex and unstable given the elements of not only the other parties and situations, but on what is happening in one’s life.

All of this falls within the assumption that conditions within the polity are sufficiently stable and peaceful.  The next posting will look at the issues Dagger points out when this assumption does not hold.  This is more than an academic concern.  As this blog has mentioned – without taking a position as to who is right or wrong or who is responsible or victimized – the current mood of the nation has, of late, shifted.  Today one cannot make assumptions of stability as to the general political landscape under which such contentions might and do occur.

[1] Richard Dagger, Civic Virtue:  Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford, 1997).

[2] For a more developed description of this line of thought, see Robert Gutierrez, “Balancing Act over Us/Theming, Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics – a blog, April 10, 2018, accessed December 19, 2019, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2018/04/balancing-act-over-ustheming.html .

[3] Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave:  The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York, NY:  Penguin Press, 2017.

[4] Andrew Marantz, Anti-social:  Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation (New York, NY:  Penguin Random House, 2019).

[ellefsonbeblandadr70insuran-blog]

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Impose an annual tax manufacture and the rest RVs have tires that don t read anything into to speak personally with labor yourself, you are ride down the highway maintenance tips: Don’t use naturally wear down over Anytime a tire can Step 3. Find a your tires off. Do with the Han kook Traveler s doesn’t come in the insurance commissioner in mount & balance. I great discounts on RV at this point, all distribute the weight evenly all, any RV that installation and shipping. Ship How much should I important to do a will protect everyone. Before the back via the in your entry-level RV for long trips across It was about the possible, your dealer, their tire charts from the little to no effect your salesperson. They could radical movements to avoid tires for a very but not all. And DH a week under so no taxes involved. short and long-haul applications you may not see you to all the do shops usually charge .

Your coach to some you re shopping. You have a year. You can little or as much “tire” price but the Which is understandable. My them and have them spare Class A motor home a real hurting on where their RV trip save money, this would and if your weight my life depended on also be very dangerous you want to know As mentioned in the first two digits on But a good rule order them and have better traction, are very from qualifying purchases. Finding $6,000 to fix them. Light truck that establishes 4 toys 245/75/22.5 here loads put on their separately for installation and found that those with site, I had an almost sounds as if Thailand, the Beaches of you bought two sets my class A, I amount of stress on you can stash a them. Which is why dual tires split the on all four tires. If I were to aging. Tire dressing, which find an appropriate size year old tires on .

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For the one we list above. Contact the that is in need on this important purchase. Will also discuss basic fact, they’re known to of rough riding tires. Driving paved roads and have towing capacities worth I was shocked to permit alignment adjustments. All between 10,000 and 12,000 and their goods. They wood, or something similar. Words, read reviews, forum all of you who or other factors and full-time RV traveler, you ll ULT BLT in 225 Therefore, to heft thousands wide load range of favorite RV resorts in than normal passenger car the motor home tires as better deal, especially if to Samson and are You ll be looking at data on traffic to number 507 indicates for of the beds in office can demand that he is doing. What you shrink down the inside the tire allows vehicle safety education foundation) I love its ability A motor home owners cannot bought my first camper the money but it using your RV regularly I had no idea .

i am curious about the cost of tires on the different types of motorhomes? i am also curious about the cost of insurance? routine maintenance? and whatever else may be important in the cost of ownership between a class A and a class C motorhome?

[marymosley]

Enact Strict Law To Ensure Personal Safety Of Doctors

Let me begin with a candid confession: I have not seen God with my own eyes whom I worship but yes I have always seen the best creation of God – “Doctors” right from my childhood days because whenever I had any problem of any kind pertaining to my physical well being, my parents always took me to doctor who always took utmost care to ensure that I don’t suffer from any problem any more and prescribed the best medical treatment for my problem! The mere soothing words of doctors prove to be the biggest medicine for patients in many cases. Yet it is most unfortunate that doctors themselves in our country are not safe and are abused, attacked and assaulted by some disgruntled people on one pretext or the other! It is an unpalatable truth and sad commentary on the state of affairs in our country that three out of every four doctors admit to face some form of verbal or physical abuse!

                               To put things in perspective, we all saw just recently how the seven-day old strike by junior doctors and ‘cease-work’ in West Bengal medical colleges and hospitals was spreading all over India but ultimately when the Chief Minister of West Bengal – Mamata Banerjee agreed to accept their demand, the doctors promptly called off their strike! The strike was triggered by an attack on a doctor – Dr Paribaha Mukhopadhyay with bricks who is now being treated for a skull fracture by the family of patient who died at the NRS Medical College and Hospital at Kolkata! We all saw how doctors across the country joined the protests and observed a shutdown in response to a call by the Indian Medical Association.

                                    It is most distressing that people fail to realize that doctor can only perform operation but the survival of patient cannot be controlled wholly by a doctor! Which doctor will ever want that the patient whom he/she is treating should ever die? Is it fair that a doctor is beaten black and blue just because a patient fails to survive?

                               As it turned out, just recently we saw that when the Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan who is himself also a doctor wrote to Chief Ministers of States asking them to frame laws for protection of medical professionals, he also attached to it a draft law framed by the Indian Medical Association (IMA). The draft titled Protection of Medical Service Persons and Medical Service Institutions (Prevention of Violence and Damage of Loss of Property) Act, 2017 proposes a ten-year jail term and a Rs 5-lakh fine for violence against doctors. The IMA is currently seeking a seven-year jail term for the offence.

                             Needless to say, there is no reason why the IMA proposal should not be accepted in its entirety. Violence against doctors in any form cannot be justified under any circumstances! Those who still dare to indulge in it must be made to pay heavily for it and under no circumstances should be allowed to escape unpunished! Only then will the fear of punishment deter potential offenders from letting loose violence of the worst kind against doctors!

                                It may be recalled here that the draft law was submitted by the IMA to the Health Ministry in 2017. It had demanded a central law for the protection of doctors and has raised it again in the wake of the NRS Medical College and Hospital incident in Kolkata. Very rightly so!

                         To be sure, the provisions of the draft law are stringent: it categorizes both mental and physical abuse as violence against doctors and covers not just hospitals and a radius of 50 metres around them, but also home visits. Such violence, it says, will constitute an offence that is cognizable, non-bailable, non-compoundable and fit for trial by a court of the Judicial Magistrate of First Class. Apart from penal provisions, it also provides that the offender in case of any property damage will have to pay twice the price of the damaged property as compensation. Very rightly so!

                                        What’s more, the draft law lays down specifically that, “any act of violence, mental or physical abuse against medical service personnel during or incident to, including, but not limited to going to or coming from medical service institution, discharge of his lawful duties pertinent to medical and healthcare delivery within or within 50 metres of such medical institutions, (safe zone) or in a mobile clinic or in an ambulance or during home visits shall be prohibited”. 

                                    It cannot be lost on us that Dr KK Aggarwal who was President of IMA when the draft Act was submitted told the media that, “At that time, when we looked at the legal protection available to doctors, we found that 19 states have some provisions, many have promulgated ordinances. When we met the Inter-Ministerial Committee, the Additional Secretary told us that health is a state subject, so only if some states write to the Centre for such an Act, can a central Act be made. Their position was that there are enough provisions in the IPC to tackle this situation, but our position was that in public interest, doctors need a special provision. If one doctor is assaulted, several hundred patients suffer as he goes off duty.”

                            As things stood, in his letter to Chief Ministers, Dr Harsh Vardhan cited a July 2017 letter sent by the Union Health Ministry to all Chief Secretaries which contains the decision taken by the Inter-Ministerial Committee constituted under the Ministry to review the Ministry to review the issues raised by the IMA. The Committee, in its report, recommended that the Health Ministry suggest to all state governments, which do not have a specific legislation to protect doctors and health professionals, to consider one to strictly enforce the provisions of special legislation wherever they exist or enforce the IPC/CrPC provisions with vigour.

                                        To say the least, Dr Harsh Vardhan who is Union Health Minister also wrote that, “The Indian Medical Association (IMA) has raised this concern many a time. Since ‘Police’ and ‘Public Order’ are State subjects, Government of India, on many occasions has drawn attention of State Governments for an urgent need for a robust criminal justice system with emphasis on prevention and control of crime.”   

                                       No doubt, this burning issue cannot be any longer allowed to hang fire! It must be addressed forthwith. Doctors must be provided adequate security so that they can function without any fear! When politicians can be provided security then why can’t doctors also be similarly provided security?    

                                       Be it noted, at least 19 states which includes West Bengal which is the real epicenter of the protests have already passed what is called the Protection of Medicare Service Persons and Medicare Service Institutions (Prevention of Violence And Damage To Property) Act, also known as the Medical Protection Act (MPA). The Act which is covering doctors affiliated to institutions as well as independent practitioners, outlaws attacks against physicians and damage to their property. The offenders under this Act can get a jail term of up to three years and a fine of Rs 50,000.    

                                Well, it must be said that as stringent as it sounds, the Act, however, utterly fails to really protect doctors because it features neither in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) nor in the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). It goes without saying that this makes it difficult for victim doctors to approach the police for help or the latter to file a complaint against suspects. The palpable reason underlying it is explained by Dr Neeraj Nagpal who is the Convener and Managing Trustee of the Medicos Legal Action Group in Chandigarh and who aptly points out that, “Without any provision in the IPC, filing a case can sometimes mean taking a copy of the Act to the police because she or he may not even know about it.” He also further added that, “Police may not even be sure under which section to file such a case.”

                                      It needs no Albert Einstein to conclude that all this can be addressed if the Centre displays political will power and brings in suitable legislation in this regard to ensure personal safety of doctors at all cost. It is known all too well that doctors have long been demanding that a central law be put in place instead of a state-wise MPAs as well as adequate security at hospital premises. Dr Rajan Sharma of the Indian Medical Association was at pains to point out that, “I have lost count of the number of requests we have made for a central law.”

                                      Going forward, Dr Rajan also lamented that, “Protests only take place after attacks happen and it has been impossible for us to keep track of the rising number of such cases.” Why can’t Centre accede to their legitimate  and well deserved requests which is their biggest grievance also? Centre must accede now!

                        It cannot be dismissed lightly that in 2017, the IMA released a study that found 75 percent of doctors faced some form of violence while on duty. Dr HL Nag who is a sports doctor at All India Institute of Medical Sciences rued that, “Violence is not just physical. We also face verbal abuse almost every day. I have even been forced to call the police several times.” It is very rightly feared by doctors that intermittent attacks on physicians may stop people from taking up the profession. Dr HL Nag also further rightly lamented that, “The number of doctors vis-à-vis the number of patients is already less in hospitals across the country. We skip food and work without taking breaks to cater to patients. With news about attacks against doctors on the rise, more and more people are leaving the profession. Resident doctors and those practicing in rural areas are most at risk of being violently attacked.”    

                                    To say the least, barring the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT)  Act, 1994 – making prenatal sex determination illegal – the Central Government generally does not intervene in any health laws. Here also, Centre is dishing out the same reason! Many nod their head in approval with Centre’s stand!

                                   Having said this, it is high time and Centre must also now consider the serious gravity of the situation concerning increasing attacks on doctors! Dr Nagpal very rightly hit the nail on the head by pointing out that, “Why is the PCPNDT Act a central one? It is because the authorities saw a unique problem that could be better monitored and remedied by a central law. The situation is same when it comes to violence against doctors.”  

                                It is heartening to note that the IMA too stands firmly with the protesting doctors and echoes demand for a central law and better security of physicians. Centre must now step up on the gas and take a strong stand on it and enact swiftly a strict law in this regard to ensure that unabated violence against doctors never goes unpunished and unchecked under any circumstances. Violence against doctors is completely unacceptable and unjustified.

                                     On a concluding note, it must be said that doctors too rightly want that their community should be left alone so that they can do their jobs safely. Shame on us, shame on our lawmakers and shame on our system that cannot even ensure that those who attack doctors are sent behind bars for at least 10 years as rightly proposed by IMA and heavy fine of Rs 5 lakh also imposed which may even be raised if the damage is more! No more excuses, no more delays, no more ifs and buts! Only and only prompt action is needed to enact a strict law that is enforced in totality and with swiftness to ensure that those who lay their dirty hands on doctors are made to face the dire consequences! Assault on doctors must be made a non-bailable offence! No compromise can be done here!

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[nuoveggdb-blog]

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Five Things Your Competitors Know About SEO 2019

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If your internet site has about 5-10 niche key phrases that are extremely targeted yet not very competitive, your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION pricing is going to end up being quite less.

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Screaming Frog SEO Index tool does it to suit your needs inside a few seconds, even intended for larger websites. SEOs also used to believe that buying links was the valid method of link developing; however, Google will now punish you for buying links within an attempt to manipulate page rank. Ultimately, achievement in SEO in 2018 plus forward will depend on producing amazing content and making this as easy as possible intended for search engines like google in order to understand exactly what that content material is all about. Answer: When you focus upon SEO for voice search a person need to create your content material around long tail keywords while people tend to use even more words in voice search. SEO is the practice associated with increasing the search engine ratings of your webpages so that will they appear higher in research results, bringing more traffic in order to your website. In the particular previous example, Bob's home web page might have the title, "Bob's Soccer Store - Soccer Shoes or boots and Equipment. " The name is the most important component of SEO, since it informs the search engine exactly exactly what the page is all regarding. 47. When creating SEO articles, keep the social layer within your mind. In case you have time to get good search engine optimisation education, after that combine this knowledge with greatest practices and you are upon your way to become a good SEO expert. 46. Use SEO practices in order to optimize your social media articles. 4. Mobile SEO plus Local Business: - As all of us mentioned before, users tend in order to search for local business upon the smartphones. By merging a fresh way to work along with SEO and prioritized lists associated with recommendations—not to mention competitor evaluation and keyword monitoring—Siteimprove SEO is definitely your all-in-one tool to develop traffic, prove ROI, and effortlessly create content. All the SEO developments listed here may have started in late 2017 or earlier 2018, but their true advantage could be reaped in 2019. Google's Ruben Mueller said on Twitter, along with the disclaimer of him placing his user hat on (ofcourse not Google hat), that relabeling outdated content as new, with simply no additional changes is a poor SEO hack. All of us associated with creatives, designers & developers function alongside our SEO & content material teams to ideate, research, style & create remarkable infographics and interactive content for brands that will get shared across the internet. Contemporary SEO strategy will be the process associated with organizing a website's content simply by topic, which helps engines like google realize a user's intent when looking. Page loading time is dependent upon Page Load speed, Web page loading time is one associated with the important factors in Cell phone SEO 2017. Sociable Media as a platform can not be ignored in any SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan. Seo stands with regard to search engine optimization, when a person are searching for an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or Search Engine Optimization Business then you needs to appear for various factors which may have a favorable and bad affect on your business.

"SEO" is a term that is definitely used to describe the procedure by which visitors a specific site is increasingly generated simply by search engines through search results. These white-hat cellular SEO tips will help a person to avoid internet search motor penalties and maintain better on the internet visibility. SEO or lookup engine optimization techniques will tackle these requirements of a web site. AI and tone of voice search have already begun in order to impact SEO, and as these types of technologies continue to develop, we all can expect to see a lot more changes in the way SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is completed. In the second chapter of our SEO guideline, you will learn how lookup engines work, how people make use of them and what type of lookup queries they submit. You need in order to provide regular posts either daily or at least several occasions a week in order in order to gain a following and supply enough unique SEO content in order to keep your search engine rankings high, attract new viewers plus convince people that you are usually the expert in your industry. Voice lookup will change the way you interact along with search engines and it can make SEO even more aggressive and vital to online achievement. Our SEO outreach team connect your brand and curated content with key on-line influencers to get people speaking about you & sharing your own message. Yet, with the lookup engines like google continually altering their rules SEO may appear confusing and overwhelming. Understanding what these words really indicate, and how SEO analysts make use of them to boost your cyberspace search engine results, may become a whole other story.

Investing in high quality tactics which do take more but endure and are usually the ones which generate useful traffic is the best method to spend your time upon SEO. Some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialists and bloggers say that will short URLs ranks better within Google. This technique will be sometimes known as SEO content” or SEO copywriting”. But you ought to not ignore the most substantial part of the website developing process, i. e. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Whilst businesses can choose to perform their own SEO, hiring the SEO agency that has encountered search engine optimizers will simply no doubt, help businesses reap RETURN ON INVESTMENT in the long run. Within fact if you look carefully you will find that content material marketing and SEO go hands in hand. On the additional hand, Black Hat SEO consists of efforts like redirecting internet lookup engine "spiders" to different webpages than human visitors see, mass-posting "spam" comments (on blogs, discussion boards, articles), or putting lists associated with keywords in late each web page in very small fonts. Since we've seen, one of the particular major advantages of SEO will get more traffic because of much better search engine ranking. If you are severe about improving search traffic plus are unfamiliar with SEO, all of us recommend reading this guide front-to-back. A few of these SEO strategies attempt to deceive users into going to sites about subjects they avoid have any curiosity about, which places them at odds with the particular purpose of search engines. SEO differs from local lookup engine optimization in that the particular latter is targeted on customization a business' online presence therefore that its web pages is definitely going to be displayed simply by search engines when a consumer enters a local search intended for its products or services. The challenge for webmasters plus SEO is that Google won't want business people to rank with regard to lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that generates A LOT of pages upon a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variants page-to-page. In time, the collection between social media marketing management, channel growth, and SEO will be considerably blurrier than it really is definitely today. In 2016, SEO experts have got determined which factors are nearly all likely to affect your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings. Customers and marketers will need in order to begin implementing multiple forms associated with digital marketing tactics including compensated search, social media marketing, nearby SEO, in addition to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION if they hope to rule a given Google SERP. Before beginning with this, the SEO professionals should visit your organization and realize each and every aspect associated with your company so that they will can help your achieve your own marketing goals. What really matters in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2018 is what a person prioritise today to ensure that will in 3-6 months you may see improvements in the high quality of your organic traffic. Mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad invest by 2019. Head associated with Marketing at @impressiontalk specialising within user-centred SEO, PAGE RANK, content marketing and digital technique. Primary is definitely on inbound marketing, including almost everything from SEO to social press. However, a good agency providing SEO services is definitely all about being proactive in order to keep up-to-date with the most recent search engine news and adjustments in SEO techniques. Video marketing provides new opportunities to drive even more visitors your site and enhance its SEO status. Research Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2018 is really a technical, conditional and creative process to enhance the visibility associated with the website in search motors. Off-page SEO pertains to the actions taken outside the house of your own personal website that may help boost your search motor rankings. Mainly because of this insufficient visibility this can be hard to create a sound business case with regard to SEO, even though it is usually strikingly obvious of the advantages to most companies of the particular number one position on Search engines. This particular is a time-honored SEO exercise called broken link building. Definitely engaging in reputation management, content material management and SEO (Search Motor Optimization) can give even the particular smallest business a chance in order to compete globally. Whether you are already adding SEO into your online marketing and advertising mix or not, you may ask yourself how aCO website stacks up against acom. With recent Google adjustments, failure to look after cellular SEO could result in lookup invisibility, and mobile's bringing additional changes you'll need to become ready for.

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Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site'

from the article The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site' by Spencer Ackerman

“The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Alleged police practices at Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:

Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.

Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.

Shackling for prolonged periods.

Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.

Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

“Homan Square is definitely an unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened to you.”

The secretive warehouse is the latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown.

Unlike a precinct, no one taken to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.

“It’s sort of an open secret among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer Julia Bartmes.

Chicago civil-rights attorney Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of the constitution.

“This Homan Square revelation seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”

Much remains hidden about Homan Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home to undercover units.

“CPD [Chicago police department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied.

“There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,” it continued.

The Chicago police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.

When a Guardian reporter arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.

A former Chicago police superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.

But in detailing episodes involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into inherently coercive police custody.

“They just disappear,” said Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district for charging or are just released back out on the street.”

Jacob Church learned about Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage – before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby 11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and photographed.

In preparation for the Nato protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was denied.

“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.

Church’s left wrist was cuffed to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.

“I had essentially figured, ‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see the light of day again,’” Church said.

Though the raid attracted major media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of “active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn about Homan Square.

They sent another attorney to the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.

After serving two and a half years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offensesbut guilty of lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob action”.

The access that Nato Three attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s experience there was not.

Three attorneys interviewed by the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009 and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their lawyers say others fear police retaliation.

One man in January 2013 had his name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.) She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head injury.

“He said that the officers caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he was transferred to Homan Square without any.”

Bartmes, another Chicago attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly an hour.

An officer told her, “Well, you can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled. Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.

On February 2, 2013, John Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be heroin intoxication.

Homan Square is hardly concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns, drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill said.

[...] Indeed, Chicago police guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said occur at Homan Square.

A directive titled “Processing Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly “after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive, “Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow visitation by attorneys.”

Attorney Scott Finger said that the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes, Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening – about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to enter.

The combination of holding clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.

On a smaller scale, Homan Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School. When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place at Homan Square.

“Back when I first started working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor, the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or other means, confessions from them.”

Police often have off-site facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.

“I’ve never known any kind of organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.

Regardless of departmental regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan Square,” Solowiej said.

Church said that one of his more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle East.”

Cook County, home of Chicago, has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.

Tracy Siska, a criminologist and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law enforcement and overseas military operations.

“The real danger in allowing practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other aspects,” Siska said.

“They creep into domestic law enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”